A 

TREASURY OF ILLUSTRATTO?^ 

BY / 

HENRY WARD BEECIIER 

EDITED FROM HIS 

PUBLISHED WORKS AND UNPUBLISHED 

REPORTS OF HIS SPOKEN WORDS B Y 

JOHN R. HOWARD 

AND 

TRUMAN J. ELLINWOOD 

WITH AN INTKODUCTION BY 

NEWELL D WIG LIT HILLLS 



" Though reasons av the. pilUirs of 
the fabric, yet siwilitudex are the 
winciows which yirv the hest liphts." 

—Thomas Fulleb. 




New York Chicago Toronto 

FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 

London and Edinburgh 






Copyright : 
By John R. Howakd and Truman J. Ei.linwood, 

April, 1904; 
By T- B. Ford & Co. in 1S75 ; 
By "H. W. Bekcher in 1882, 1885 ; 
By Fords, Howard, & Hulhert in 1883, 1887; 
By Truman J. Ei.linwood in 1S92; 
By Eunice W. Beecher in 1S95, 1897; 
By William C. Beecher in 1897, 1900, 1901, 1902. 



LIBR*RV nf CONGRESS 

Two Oooles Received 

SEP 1 1904 
/ Cooyrtsrht Entry 

CLASS 0- %^<a. Na 

0{ vT J' ^ ^ 

' COPY B 1 



Introduction 



THE teacher of men must himself perceive the truth, and then 
convey to others what has thus become his own. He must be 
both a seer and a sayer, whether he sees with the material or 
the spiritual eye, and whether he speaks in words, tones, forms or colors. 
The power and permanency of his work depend upon the scope and 
accuracy of his seeing, on the one hand, and the sincerity, sympathy, and 
felicity of his saying, on the other. The function of saying includes also 
a further act of seeing ; for the prophet, poet or artist must know not only 
his own theme, as it appears to himself, but also the nature and use of his 
instrument of expression, and the minds of those whom he seeks to lead 
to his own standpoint, that they may receive his vision. 

In this double equipment, Henry Ward Beecher was supremely great. 
Phillips Brooks and Charles Spurgeon called him the Shakespeare of the 
modern pulpit, doubdess in recognition, not merely of the richness and 
variety of his gifts, but chiefly of the Shakespearean faculty of perceiving 
the aspects of many-sided human life and character, and of presenting 
their relations in images which remain when the steps of argument and the 
theories of philosophy have faded away. 

These expositions by illustration are characteristic of genius and in- 
spiration. The Bible is full of them. Job, without arguing tediously the 
omnipotence of God, depicts it in volcanoes, thunderstorms, strange mon- 
sters of sea and land, and the orderly procession of the stars. Moses 
compares the brief earthly life of man to a story soon told, a flower soon 
withered, a vapor soon dispersed. David sings the Shepherd Psalm, and 
fixes forever in universal consciousness the sense of Divine providence. 
Paul summarizes the relativity of our knowledge, by saying "we see in a 
glass, darkly," — forestalling and correcting in advance the modern agnos- 
tic, who professes not to see at all ; and reveals in a flash the true theory 
of evolution, when he says that the whole creation has travailed in suc- 
cessive births from the beginning, each new generation being an upward 
step, divinely ordained "in hope." Above all, Jesus Christ, in parable 
and picture, gives revelations of truth and types of character which sur- 
vive all changes of language, social organization and intellectual system. 

vii 



viii INTRODUCTION 

Samaria is buried in mounds of earth, where archseologists may dig for 
souvenir-bricks; but the Good Samaritan we know and recognize, as we 
do the Pharisee and the Scribe, Dives and Lazarus, the unjust steward, or 
the sower of the seed. 

Secular literature exhibits the same principle. The highest genius is 
pictorial ; the works that abide are pictures. Homer's Iliad is a gallery 
of pictures ; Dante's threefold epic of the unseen world is another. And 
so it is with Shakespeare, and all the rest of the sons of fame, to whom 
not only certain classes of specialists but all men of all times pay glad 
reverence. Others there have been, indeed, — a glorious company, — whose 
contributions of invention, statesmanship, learning or criticism have mightily 
influenced their own and later times, without surviving in individual form 
to be reckoned among the world's eternal masterpieces. No doubt we owe 
more in the aggregate to this host of thinkers and actors than to the few 
crowned ones. But the question of merit and reward does not concern 
me here. I would only point out the recognized, universal and imperish- 
able supremacy of the genius which sees and says, pictorially. 

Without attempting now to discuss this principle in its application to 
other departments, let us seek its ground and reason in the domain of 
oratory and literature. This is indeed its widest sphere, because a much 
larger number of men can understand and be moved by language than by 
any other form of communication, except direct exhibition to the senses. 
That is the universal convincing and compelling mode. " Seeing is believ- 
ing," is a profound general truth; and it follows, in the use of speech, that 
when men are made clearly to "see" a proposition, they are disposed to 
believe it. Moreover, what has been seen can be remembered, that is, 
recalled and seen again, by most men, much more easily than a bare train 
of thought. And even an argument can be kept in mind nmch belter, if 
connected with a picture or summarized in a pictorial saying. In this 
respect, an illustration is reasoning and philosophy made easy, — not that 
it supersedes the careful, slow process of demonstration or analysis, but 
that it relieves us so often from the necessity of traveling again the 
long road, by giving us the itinerary in epitome, and a monument to mark 
the point already once reached and determined. But a true illustration 
may do for us even more than this. Being a picture, it sets forth the truth 
in perspective, expressing relative values, and emphasizing essential features. 
Mere argument cannot always do that : for a chain of logic is no stronger 
than its weakest link; and the work of the patient reasoner, carefully 
observing and connecting facts, may be so closely confined to details as to 
exclude wide prospects. On the surveyor's map, one piece of land looks 
like another. Even if it shows that there is a mountain here, or a forest 



INTRODUCTION ix 

there, it gives no such hint of the landscape as the merest sketch of the 
mountain or forest would furnish. So the investigator, recorder, philos- 
opher or theologian is needed to give us our bearings ; but the poet- 
prophet, seeing and saying, must give us our views. 

It does not follow that mere seeing of visions is the proof of a true 
poet, or that every utterer of "views" is a true prophet. Scripture itself 
mentions more false prophets than true ones, and tells us more than once 
of false prophets who were sincere. The gre^^t prophets of Judah were 
thinkers and statesmen as well as seers. And the prophets of every age 
have stood upon facts, while they discerned principles ; have recognized 
their immediate surroundings, while they scanned far horizons. 

To the test of this conception, thus incompletely and imperfectly 
stated, let us bring the genius of Henry Ward Beecher. 

Many so-called theologians and superficial critics used to say that 
Mr. Beecher knew nothing about theology. The grounds of this judgment, 
so far as it had any grounds, seem to have been, that he made himself 
understood by plain people ; that he presented habitually the central truths 
of the Gospel, in their perspective relation to all others ; and that his 
hearers carried away with them, and repeated as household words, the 
pregnant illustrations in which his expositions culminated. Such a criti- 
cism confounds clearness with shallowness, and reticence with ignorance. 
It is very true that Mr. Beecher did not often preach formal 
theology, in guarded systematic statement ; but he knew it thoroughly. 
Trained in the home of the great theologian, Lyman Beecher, where the 
subtleties of New England theological controversy were the table-talk of 
the household, and living for five years in the atmosphere of a heresy-trial, 
he was at thirty a real, though untitled, doctor of divinity, familiar with 
all the arguments for and against not only the general scheme of doctrine 
which we now loosely accept as "orthodox," but also the varieties and 
sub-varieties which are now well-nigh forgotten. The Five Points of Cal- 
vinism, the positions of the Arminians, the Restorationists, etc., were his 
theological alphabet-blocks, with which he could play and spell out the 
innumerable permutations and combinations of them into "semi" and 
"sub" and "supra" and "ultra" varieties. But this juggling with 
theoretical subtleties seemed empty, to his earnest spirit, and he decided 
that they did not furnish the proper material for the preacher who sought 
to bring men to Christ, This decision was largely wrought in him by a 
memorable vision, in which the love of God in Christ was the central, 
luminous element. Like Paul, he obeyed the heavenly vision, and preached 
thenceforward Christ crucified, the incarnation of suffering love. Like 
both Christ and Paul, he crowned his arguments and appeals with pictures. 



INTRODUCTION 



If any man doubts that these " mere illustrations " carried deep insight and 
thought, and covered the essential truths of Christianity, let him look 
through the collection herewith published, and be convinced. 

Yet Mr. Beecher's sermons are not mere series of illustrations, any 
more than " Hamlet " was, as the young man who saw it for the first time 
said, "a mere string of quotations." The illustrations are the parts most 
quoteil, of course. But I venture to say that the seven hundred published 
sermons of Mr. Beecher are exceptionally abundant in the statement of 
sound doctrine. 

As in all departments of rhetoric and oratory, so also in the art of 
effective, pertinent and worthy illustration, Mr. Beecher carefully and 
patiently trained himself. The apparent ease and spontaneity of his mature 
years had been won by long and patient practice ; and to the end of life, 
he was constantly gathering fresh material both from nature and from 
human life. He knew that an illustration should recommend an unfamiliar 
truth by appeal to a familiar one ; that explaining one new proposition by 
another, equally strange, was only to create two difficulties, instead of one. 
He was not prone to quote from books which his hearers had not read, or 
adduce experiences with which they could not instantly sympathize. 

Dr. Rossiter W. Raymond (to whom I am indebted for much helpful 
suggestion) has given elsewhere a very striking account of the three 
habitually recurrent states of Mr. Beecher's mind, — that of study and 
acquisition, that of creative activity, and that of mental relapse and rest. 
It was in the first stage that he lived most of the time, associating with 
books or nature or men, and mentally laying up facts and experiences which 
might be available as media of sympathy, and therefore of power, in his 
work as a preacher. By such accumulations, his sermons grew in his mind. 
But he did not usually deliver a sermon until it had come before him as a 
picture. Then all the pertinent thoughts and illustrations emerged from 
their hiding-places, drawn by the pictorial associations of his theme; and 
in the supreme hour of utterance he saw what he said ; and what he said, 
his hearers saw. How to make them do so, was his constant study. For 
this he entered shop and factory, forest and field, fished with fishermen, 
shod horses with blacksmiths, talked roses with gardeners and oaks with 
foresters and battles witli soldiers. 

I possess a large number of Mr. Beecher's manuscripts — one or more 
for every one of his fifty years of ministerial life. Nothing is more inter- 
esting than to note how, after elaborating a proposition in writing, he has 
subsequently condensed it, or replaced it with a single stroke of illustration, 
revealing the whole field like a stroke of lightning. In one manuscript he 
had filled two pages with an argument against the ultra-Calvinistic doctrine 



INTRODUCTION xi 

of the Divine justice. No doubt, if he had been getting out a book on 
theology, he would have let the passage stand. But apparently he looked 
it over and decided that it was too abstruse to be taken in by the ear 
at a single hearing and appreciated so thoroughly as to change the 
hearer's previous notions. At all events, he crossed out the whole of it 
and wrote instead one line: "God is not a bundle of thunderstorms! " 
Another passage, similarly canceled, was replaced with : "The heart of 
God is the world's hospital ! " And again, an argument for fearless ap- 
proach to the Throne of Grace is summed up in this : " God does not sit 
like a threatening cloud in the sky ! and man does not need to approach 
him under an umbrella of excuses." Such pictorial phrases are winged 
words, that fly whither arguments could not reach. They have lighted at 
one time or another on every pulpit in the United States, inspiring some, 
and in some degree modifying all, of the preaching of the Gospel among 
us. Who can measure the suggestive and perpetual value of such pithy 
sayings as these ? 

" A text is the gate to a sermon. Some ministers swing on the gate 
instead of going in to explore the garden." 

"The Bible is like a telescope. If a man looks through his telescope 
he sees the world beyond; but if he looks at his telescope he sees nothing 
but that." 

Mr. Beecher's sermons did not begin to be published regularly (except 
in certain daily and weekly papers which recognized their value), until 
he was fifty-five years old. After that time (1868) about six hundred were 
printed; in the period between 1840 and 1868 one hundred occasional 
discourses appeared. A study of both series discloses a progress in method 
and felicity of illustration. But there is always wonderful vitality and 
appropriateness in his illustrations. They are never extracts from a scrap- 
book, selected as likely to be oratorically effective, and carefully "led 
up to " in the preceding text of the sermon. They spring out of the theme 
itself, and the analogies which his quick sense has detected between spiritual 
truth and the sun, the clouds, the rain, the flowers, the homes and occupa- 
tions of men, the experiences and fancies of children, and the joys and 
sorrows of human love. During several years in which Mr. Beecher was 
traveling and lecturing a great deal, his illustrations were taken with 
notable frequency from factories, shops, and various industries. I believe 
the reason was that, when he went to a city to lecture, he visited, if pos- 
sible, its leading manufactories, and learned as much as he could about the 
work in which the people were most interested. 

The general type of his sermons was that of a preliminary statement 



xii INTRODUCTION 

of doctrine, followed by a practical application. His illustrations were 
perhaps most numerous under the latter head, but they were freely employed 
wherever they would effectively enforce the truth. It has long been recog- 
nized by men of culture and common sense that Mr. Beecher never told 
stories or made jokes, in order to raise a laugh. His dramatic instinct 
and vivid imagination often provoked a smile, when he did not expect it ; 
and he certainly did not exclude wit and humor as means of moving men, 
or deem them barred from a proper use in the pulpit. His well-known 
declaration, "All the bells that God has put in my belfry shall ring!" 
comprises his theory on that head. But only fools could fail to recognize 
that the corruscations of his vivid oratory were, as has been well said, 
" but the sparks from a locomotive," and that the mighty train of a serious 
purpose thundered on, undisturbed by them. 

Another characteristic of Mr. Beecher' s illustrations is their absolute 
sincerity. This is not so common a virtue in the use of figurative language 
as might be supposed. The employment of poetic phrases because they 
sound well, is too often indulged without consciousness of their real mean- 
ing. Hence "mixed figures," which are at bottom moral faults. When 
Wendell Phillips once said in Boston Music Hall, "The time is coming 
when Liberty will stand by every newborn child, and drop in its cradle 
the schoolhouse and the ballot-box," his language was not rhetorically 
sincere, for it implied, what could not be true, that he was telling some- 
thing that he mentally saw. Mr. Beecher never could have said that, 
because he always saw what he described. And another form of sincerity 
in illustration which characterized him was his really knowing what his 
illustrations implied that he knew. This virtue is rarer yet. Our poets 
and orators are forever drawing upon scenes, trades and sciences for similes 
and analogies which betray their ignorance to experts. Mr. Beecher never 
could have written the hymn which has disgusted so many sailors by its 
declaration that the Christian, in the midst of tempest and breakers, doesn't 
mind the billows' shock, because he is "anchored to a rock" ! He knew 
what he was talking about. When he took a simile or analogy from a 
particular trade, the men of that trade in his congregation "sat up," and 
appreciated the point with instant approval. That was, in fact, his def- 
inite purpose ; to capture men by an intelligent sympathy, and thus to lead 
them from the knowledge they had already to the higher truth they needed. 

This collection of Mr. Beecher's illustrations has-been made from both 
published and unpublished sources. Mr. Truman J. Ellinwood, whose 
stenographic notes comprise the latter, and are, indeed, the basis of a large 
part of the former, was for thirty years engaged in reporting Mr. Beecher's 
sermons, addresses, and prayers, and acquired by such constant practice an 



INTRODUCTION xiii 

accuracy which the best expert could not attain through occasional op- 
portunities only; so that Mr. Beecher announced in the "Plymouth 
Pulpit" pamphlet that he would hold himself responsible for no other re- 
ports. Mr. John R. Howard was for twenty years Mr. Beecher 's literary 
adviser, and publisher, and intimate friend. For a long period, he revised 
for publication all the sermons issued in "Plymouth Pulpit," and most of 
them bear the titles given by him, Mr. Beecher rarely seeing the discourses 
after preaching them, until they came to him in the pamphlet form. In pre- 
paring this volume, the editors have gone through all of Mr. Beecher's 
books, as well as Mr. EUinwood's manuscripts, selecting the passages best 
suited for suggestion, meditation or comfort, and especially for homiletic 
use, Mr, Howard being responsible for the compilation, arrangement, and 
editing. The book is indeed a treasury of genius and inspiration. To 
Christian workers, Sunday-school teachers, theological students and young 
preachers, it will be invaluable. No man who studies it can fail to find 
himself mentally and spiritually enriched and stimulated. A superficial 
examination will yield innumerable precious gems for quotation, if that be 
what is desired ; but a deeper study will do far more, by teaching the 
student how to make and use his own illustrations. The arrangement of 
subjects is psychologically interesting and helpful ; and the collection as 
a whole sets forth with practical comprehensiveness the great principles 
of Mr. Beecher's teaching, as it appears in the forty volumes of his works, 
many of which are now out of print. 

Remembering the golden days when, as a college student, I first dis- 
covered the volumes of Mr. Beecher's sermons, and the rapture with which 
I read and pondered and walked in the woods to dream and brood, hardly 
knowing whether my feet touched earth or no, I envy to-day the young 
men into whose hands and hearts this book is to fall, thrilling them to a 
wider and deeper life. That they may be, as I have been, uplifted and 
inspired by its wonderful pictures, is my prayer and hope. 

Newell Dwight Hillis. 



Preface 



MANY volumes of "selections" have been made from the great 
preacher's outpourings, but all upon the merely general lines 
of gathering admirable passages. This began early in his 
Brooklyn ministry. A parishioner of his, looking over an illustrated 
"Annual " issued by one of the great religious societies, which had been 
prominent in opposing Mr. Beecher and his ideas, was struck with a cer- 
tain familiar tone of some anonymous passages, quoted for aptness or 
beauty or spiritual helpfulness in this "Annual," and showed them to Mr. 
Beecher, asking if they were not from him. He read them, smiled humor- 
ously, and said : " Yes, but what of it ? They like some of the doctrines 
but disapprove the doctor, and could not consistently use his name. They 
are welcome to publish all they are willing to : the more, the better." The 
natural feeling of a proprietary interest in his own productions never 
hampered the man : his springs were deep and never- failing. The various 
gatherings of "Thoughts," "Gems," "Pungencies," etc., accompanied 
his whole course. 

But probably the most notable gift of this exuberant mind was his 
imagination, and his facile use of it in argumentation. Aside from his om- 
nivorous reading, — a study of nature, of men, and of life, a clear percep- 
tion, and a genius of intuition, gave him a vast range of facts, which his 
fancy presented in vivid images for exemplifying statements of principle. 
His illustrations often condensed his most powerful arguments. 

This volume offers some of Mr. Beecher's Illustrations, — a few 
thousand selected from the numberless multitude, — in the belief that they 
will be suggestive not only to students, ministers, teachers, and public 
speakers, but to the devotional reader also. They are arranged, entitled, 
and indexed according to the theme or thought to be illustrated ; but they 
are indexed also according to the illustrative image used : so that they may 
be approached along either line. One may desire suggestion for illustrat- 
ing a theme he is treating ; or he may have in mind a picture from nature 
or human life and seek a line of usefulness for it as an illustration : the two 
indexes will cover the two classes. If merely general inspiration is wanted, 

XV 



PREFACE 

the reader may browse at will. Sometimes an illustration might have been 
classified under one or more other topics ; but choice had to be made. 

A reviewer remarked that Mr, Beecher's prayers were often richer 
than his sermons j and a cultivated and well-known preacher, after listening 
to him one Sunday, was struck with a figure used during the prayer, 
"which," said the hearer, "he ought to have kept for his sermon, it was 
so illuminating." But such things dropped from Mr. Beecher like rain 
from the clouds, not by premeditation, but out of illimitable reservoirs 
when the atmospheric conditions were ready. Many of the illustrations in 
this volume are taken from his prayers. Besides, the range for selection 
has been over innumerable sermons, (not only those printed in volumes, 
but also pamphlet-issues, old newspaper reports, and unprinted steno- 
graphic reports), and a large number of lecture-room talks, lectures 
to special audiences, public addresses, pulpit notices, remarks at 
funerals, private conversations, and other utterances, published and un- 
published, when, either by regular arrangement or by chance, a record 
was made. 

The difficulty has been to restrict selection to illustrations, and to be 
restrained from including the innumerable "good things," which, however 
terse, graphic, or otherwise fine, are not really figures of speech — although 
their picturesqueness often almost makes them seem to be so. This volume 
merely gathers some precious specimens from the mines of sense, wit, 
ethical instruction and lofty spirituality, which that great mind and 
greater heart have left as a heritage, to those who are wise enough to avail 
of them. 

All the copyrighted material in this volume is used under arrange- 
ment with the owners. 



Division of Themes 



NATURAL LIFE 



NO. 










PAGE 


I 


Infancy and Childhood -^ 


43 


Youth 








• '3 


70 


Man and Woman 








20 


99 


Romantic and Wedded Love . 








28 


129 


Mother — -Father — ^Home Life 








35 


177 


Health and Sickness 








45 


222 


Bereavement and Sorrow- 








53 


273 


Old Age ...... 








63 


288 


Death 








67 


3H 


Immortality and Heaven 

SOCIAL LIFE 








72 



357 
481 

504 

536 
592 
623 

710 

797 
831 



952 



Mental, Emotional, and Moral Qualities 

Joy and Happiness . 

Work 

Business Activity 

Prosperity and Wealth 

Poverty and Adversity 

Faults and Vices 

Excellences and Virtues 

Social Relations 

Society, Influence, Sympathy, Character, Repu 

tation. Friendship, Common Pains and Advan 

TAGES, Mutual Judgments, etc. 
Civic Interests ...... 

Government, Patriotism, Public Life, etc. 
xvii 



87 
114 

118 

125 

137 

143 

160 

175 
182 



206 



xvui 



DIVISION OF THEMES 





RELIGIOUS LIFE 


NO. 


PAGE 


IOI6 


The Spiritual Nature 223 


1107 


God 










' 239 


I218 


Jesus Christ 










. 262 


1297 


The Holy Spirit 










. 280 


I33I 


Conscience, Temptation, and £ 


IN 








. 288 


1433 


Religion .... 










307 


1539 


Spiritual Birth 










329 


1604 


Spiritual Growth . 










• 343 


1679 


Spiritual Life 










357 


1766 


Unselfish Love 










• 375 


180I 


Prayer .... 










382 


1834 


The Bible 










388 


1970 


Doubt and Belief 










419 


1987 


Fear and Hope 










423 


2006 


Faith .... 










427 


2039 


The Sabbath and Worship 










434 


2071 


The Church 










440 


2178 


Theology 










463 


2266 


Preaching .... 










482 


2355 


Reforms .... 










501 


2383 


Benevolence .... 
MISCELLANE 


ovs 








507 



Education and Literature 
The Human Race 



2412 

2458 

2545) 
TO y Nature 

2585 J 



515 
524 

543 



Index of Thoughts, with Illustrations 
Index of Illustrations, with Thoughts 
Index of Titles .... 



553 

597 
641 



Portraits of Mr. Beecher 

y 

From a Photograph by Rockwood, in 1885 (aged 72) . Frontispiece 

From a Daguerreotype, in 1856 (aged 43) Title Page 

From a Photograph by Whipple, in 1853 (aged 40) . Facing Page 87 
From a Photograph by Rockwood, in 1870 (aged 57) " " 223 



To his undying fame the world and his 
me77iory stajid i?i no need of witnesses. 

William Ewart Gladstone. 



NATURAL LIFE 



NATURAL LIFE 



/. INFANCr AND CHILHOOD 



1, The Baby.— The birth of a child 
is the birth of love in the family. It is 
to the mother as if there had flown in at 
the open window, from some fragrant 
honeysuckle or rose, a little bird.to sit on 
the window-sill and sing to her strange 
melodies from the unseen world. It 
seems a gift of God, musical and lov- 
ing. She takes it as a thing perfected, 
as it were an angel visitor sent to her, 

2. The Mother's Eye, — When did a 
child ever look ugly to its mother ! 
Larks doubtless think their feather- 
less, discolored, yellow-mantled squabs 
more beautiful than full-grown hum- 
ming-birds, 

3, Lessons from the Cradle. — This 
little preacher lies in the cradle teach- 
ing us to love that which is not lovely, 
but which has in it elements that prom- 
ise a future disclosure of loveliness ; 
teaching us to seek not our own good, 
but the good of another ; teaching us 
to give our proud strength utterly to 
the weakness of unrequiting child- 
hood, even in its earliest days. 

4. God's Love and His World. — 
There is not this side of the Cross of 
Christ anything that is so perfect an 
illustration of love in the administration 
and economy of God in this world, as 
the birth and development of the child 
in the family. By day and by night, 
through sickness and through health, 
during all the gradations of unfolding 
growth, there is the joy of the mother 
in overruling self for the sake of her 
Httle one. Though she be the flower 
and pride of every assembly, the mo- 
ment the fountain is opened, and the 
mother-soul is awakened, how blessed 



is the cottage ! and how willingly and 
cheerfully all the gay trappings of 
fashionable life are given up ! She 
devotes her very life to the child ; and 
as it grows older she still serves it, and 
becomes its wisdom and righteousness; 
he r experience is made over to the child, 
and she clothes it with herself, as we are 
told to put on the Lord Jesus Christ. 
As it goes on increasing in stature and 
knowledge she watches it, guides it, 
inspires it and helps it to the end. 

5 . Christ' s Valuation of Humanity, — 
A little child, according to the canons 
of the market, is just about the most 
worthless thing going. He cannot 
sow, nor reap, nor spin. He does not 
understand even the benefits that are 
bestowed upon him. A child stands 
as near to the seed-form as he can ; 
he is only an acorn. No matter 
whether he grows to be an oak or not, 
he is nothing but a seed, an acorn. 
He is the lowest in society. And yet, 
says the Saviour, this lowest thing in 
human life, a little child, is so sacred 
before God, that whoso accepts him in 
the fullness of the recognition that he 
is God's child, shall be counted to 
have received God himself ; and who- 
ever despises him, or causes him in any 
way to stumble, had better never have 
been born. Such is the teaching of 
Christ as to the value of human na- 
ture : — not as to the value of fully de- 
veloped and educated human nature, 
that stands in the economies of human 
hfe in all its usefulness ; but take the 
lowest form of it, its zero, and yet, in- 
trinsically, it has such a value that on 
no other occasion and in regard to no 



NATURAL LIFE 



other person were there such words 
uttered as by the Lord Jesus in regard 
to a little child. 

6. Prophetic Love. — The mother 
thinks she has an orator on her knee, 
though he can scarcely speak a word. 
She foresees it in her love and hope. 
The child is fractious and irritable ; 
but she says, " That is a fine nervous 
system, and it will be very sensitive by 
and by to all that is beautiful and rare." 
She can stand the irritableness of the 
child and its fractiousness, because she 
foresees what they mean for the future. 
Where there is maternal love, there is 
no service so low, no sickness so 
severe, no taxation so burdensome, no 
fact that seems so blind, but that love 
pierces it, and for that which the child 
is to be the mother glories over it. 

7. The Joy of Sacrifice. — When a 
mother is going through weariness, 
and wearing out night by night, and 
the little child hovers like an aspen- 
leaf quivering in the wind of death, 
ready to go every moment, and any 
one would take the sweet burden of 
watching from her, does not she say, 
" No, no, no — nobody but me " ? and 
is she not conscious of an inward un- 
definable joy ? 

Or, when, at night, on the disturbed 
border, some Indian foray has carried 
the torch to the house, and the mother 
and father are driving their httle flock 
before them, and the father turns at 
almost every step to destroy one or 
another of the foe, is he not at that 
moment, when every muscle is nerve, 
and every nerve is a flame of fire, con- 
scious that he is forty men, as it were ? 
No man is ever in such a state of ex- 
altation as when he is putting his life 
in peril for something that is dearer to 
him than life. 

8. Learning by Experience. — How 
beautiful is the child in the mother's 
eyes, even in its first estate, though it 



is a mere nothing then. Wrapped up 
in that child, though yet unfolded, 
are twenty or thirty strong, intense, 
immeasurable powers. When little 
by little he comes to himself, he is, as 
it were, a chest of tools. I3ut let a 
father turn his child, at five years old, 
into a shop where there is a chest of 
some thirty tools, of which he knows 
nothing, and tell him to use them all. 
He handles them just as it happens, 
and of course suffers for his ignorance. 
He snatches up one and cuts himself, 
and throws it down again ; he tries 
another with the same result ; and he 
learns, by and by, not to take a chisel 
by the wrong end. He soon finds out 
that the proper use of a gimlet is not 
to pierce his hand. By repeated mis- 
takes and mishaps, and it may be by 
an occasional exhortation, he learns to 
use those tools as they were designed 
to be used. 

9. First Animals and Then Men. — 
Children are animals before they are 
men : they are little beasts of prey; they 
are monkeys ; they are pigs ; they are 
all kinds of creatures endowed with 
instincts, indulging sometimes in this 
passion and sometimes in that. When 
they begin to act they do not manifest 
much moral sentiment. That is of a 
subsequent growth. They are unripe. 
We are not, therefore, to think they 
are coming to the gallows because they 
falsify and go to the sweetmeat jar in 
childhood. If you are faithful they 
will not always lie and steal. If you 
take occasion to instruct and train 
them aright you need not be alarmed 
lest they will end badly because there 
seems to be such a perverse bias to 
their minds in the beginning. 

10. Child-training Continuous, not 
Spasmodic. — We must inspire our chil- 
dren with higher conceptions of the 
dignity of right-living, and of the nobil- 
ity of real manhood. And it caniiot 



INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD 



be done by a word dropped here and 
there. It cannot be done by a little 
instruction imparted now and then. It 
must be done when you are kneading 
the batch. There is many a dish that 
you cannot put pepper and salt into 
after it is cooked. They must be put in 
while it is hot. And so it is in bring- 
ing up children. All the essential in- 
stincts of a nobler manhood are to be 
melted and worked into them while 
they are growing up. 

11. A Little Questioner. — When a 
child is born it feeds on the mother. 
All that necessary economy which goes 
before the child's experience resides in 
the mother. When the child is so 
grown that its mind begins to be hun- 
gry, it eats the mother's mind, just as 
before it ate the mother's milk. It is 
dependent on the mother's thought for 
its own thinking. It has all the ap- 
paratus for thinking, but no thoughts of 
its own. It is a little questioner, ask- 
ing, " What is that?" and "Who is 
that?" and "Why is that?" and 
"Where is that? " gathering knowl- 
edge from the mother's knowledge. 
The mother precedes and prepares ; 
the child comes after and devours. It 
is a much more gracious method of 
eating than the red-mouthed lion's 
way, but it is in the nature of feeding 
upon the mother's hfe and thought. 

12. Education and Training. — " Train 
up a child in the way he should go, and 
when he is old he will not depart from 
it." It does not say Educate the 
child, but " Train up the child." To 
educate a man is to tell him what to 
do, while to train him is to see that he 
does it. Training is the rubbing of 
education into muscle and bone. If 
you tell a child what is good it does 
not follow that he will not depart from 
it ; but if you train him into being good, 
he will not depart from it. If you tell 
him that he must be orderly he may 



not be ; but if you see that he is or- 
derly till he is grown up he cannot get 
rid of the habit of being so. If you 
tell him that he must not lie, that he 
must speak the truth, it is not certain 
that he will obey ; but if you see that 
he forms a habit of being ashamed of 
lying, the habit of speaking the truth 
will be so wrought into his mind that 
he will never depart from it. Habits 
formed in childhood are faster than 
colors dyed in the wool. 

13. Children. — The limbs reach 
down, and the green leaves kiss the 
children over and over again. So 
would I, if I were a green leaf, and 
not consider myself so green after all. 

14. Happiness a Means of Grace. — In 
dealing with children, have confidence 
in them. Do not try to corner them. 
When I was a child I was cornered 
many a time, and made to lie. I knew 
I was right, but I was whipped until I 
confessed that I was wrong. If a child 
has done a wrong thing, as far as pos- 
sible avoid bringing on an issue by 
which fear of a frown or the whip shall 
make him dodge into deception, and 
try to hide. That is characteristic of 
the animal-nature. It is true of the fox 
and of the hare, and it is true of the 
child. Therefore take care of your 
tenderness. You may drive the chil- 
dren into sin by sternness and severity, 
whereas by kindness and gentleness 
you can lift them over the hard spots 
in their experience, and set them down 
intact on the other side. Make the 
children about you happy, and be 
happy yourself. The aspect of happi- 
ness in every virtuous household is a 
means of grace. 

15. Learning to Speak Truth. — The 
conscientious mother is overwhelmed 
with grief ; and when the husband 
comes home, she says, " My dear, 
Charley has told a he ! " Yes, he has. 
Probably he has told a hundred ; and 



NATURAL LIFE 



he will tell a hundred more. For telling 
the truth is Hke archery ; and no boy 
hits the mark the first time. He does 
not know how to aim. He has got to 
learn. And I will assure you it is a 
great education to learn how to tell tiie 
truth. There are a great many people 
who never learn it all their hfe long. 

i6. Forgiveness of Children. — Sup- 
pose a child has told an untempted lie, 
and the mother is to deal with her. She 
calls the child to her knee, with a sad 
but serene countenance, and reasons 
with her. The child's obstinate pride 
is aroused, but the mother deals with 
her mildly and moderately, though 
justly ; and yet the hour goes by leav- 
ing the mother's face not unclouded. 
The child is in such a state that if the 
mother should smile she would take it 
to be a compromise with the lie ; and 
the mother says, " No, no, no, my 
daughter." She holds the child off 
until she is satisfied that the child's 
abhorrence of her wrong is genuine, 
and she does it for the child's own 
sake ; but the moment the child, in a 
flood of tears, rushes to the mother 
and says, " I am sorry ! I am sorry ! 
I confess it all ! I confess it all ! " — the 
moment the child's mind is changed 
so that kindness shown to her will not 
be interpreted by her as a justification 
of the lie — that moment the mother's 
arms are thrown about the child, and 
she kisses the tears from her eyes. 

Now, that is forgiveness. It is a 
restoration of the stream of confidence 
between soul and soul, mind and mind, 
heart and heart. 

17. Want of Strength not Wicked- 
ness. — A child is not to be regarded as 
wicked, primarily, that is simply feeble 
in the direction of any moral faculty, 
any more than a child is to be re- 
garded as wicked that is born lame, 
or maimed, or blind or deaf; though 
such a child should have more care 



and more education than one more 
happily organized. It is required of 
us according to what we have, and 
not according to what we have not. 
There may be many parents who sup- 
pose themselves to have very wicked 
children because dull and slow in cer- 
tain moral directions. They have 
children that will require at their hands 
much attention, and these children, 
by reason of their defects, may be- 
come more wicked; but the mere want 
of strength in any faculty, intellectual 
or moral, is not wickedness in a child. 

18. Boys. — A boy is a piece of exist- 
ence quite separate from all things else, 
and deserves separate chapters in the 
natural history of man. The real lives 
of boys are yet to be written. The 
lives of pious and good boys, which 
enrich the catalogues of great publish- 
ing societies, resemble a real boy's 
life about as much as a chicken 
picked and larded, upon a spit, and 
ready for delicious eating, resembles 
a free fowl in the fields. With some 
few honorable exceptions, they are im- 
possible boys, with incredible good- 
ness. Their piety is monstrous. A 
man's experience stuffed into a little 
boy is simply monstrous. And we 
are soundly sceptical of this whole 
school of juvenile pate de foie gras 
piety. Apples that ripen long before 
their time are either diseased or worm- 
bitten. 

19. Courtesy Due to Children. — 
Thousands of parents govern their chil- 
dren simply and solely for their own 
luxury and convenience, and take no 
pains to smooth the tones of their voice 
or to measure their action. I have seen 
children insulted so grossly by parents 
that nature in me said, " The parents 
ought to be severely punished," while 
grace in me said, " No, they only 
ought to be reproved and taught l)et- 
ter." Because God lent a little child 



INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD 



to you He did not lend it to you to be a 
rug for you to wipe your feet on, nor to 
be a slave to run of your errands, and 
for you to practice your cruelty and 
irritableness on. That child was God' s 
before it was yours. 

20. Lies to Children. — A lie told to 
a child is a monstrous thing. I abhor 
it. And yet hes are told to children 
as thick as cloves are stuck in hams 
when dressed for public occasions. 
Your child is sick, and you bring him 
a potion, and say: "It is good, my 
dear," when it is as bitter as gall. 
You are not only a liar, but a fool. 
The child learns, in a little time, not 
only that the medicine is not good, but 
that truth is not to be regarded. You 
not simply give the child an odious 
dose of medicine, but you give him a 
more odious dose of morals. You in- 
oculate him with the spirit of lying in 
the beginning. We cannot be too care- 
ful to speak the truth — and, above all, 
to children. 

21. The Gift of Love. — What can 
that little five-year-old do to help her 
mother, or to reassure her spirit in any 
way, compared with the relief and 
support which can be afforded by the 
benign and wise right-minded man to 
whom she goes for all counsel, and 
who has a large range of life, from 
which he can bring that which is 
strength to her, and a staff for her to 
lean on ? . . . But has that httle child 
nothing for the mother? Is its infe- 
riority really a bar to its making gifts, 
and to its conferring pleasure ? I tell 
you, when the older sister comes 
home, and sits down at an instru- 
ment of music, and, in the most bril- 
liant way renders some notable sym- 
phony, though the mother is greatly 
pleased — yet. let the little five-year-old 
burst into the room, with arms ex- 
tended, and see how quickly the 
mother's attention is withdrawn from 



the music, and is directed to the child! 
And does not the child bring some- 
thing to the mother — something that is 
worthy of the mother's notice? 

22. Filial Liberties. — When I go 
abroad, now advanced in years, and 
find that preparation has been made 
for me, and that respectful and kind 
attentions are shown me, I do not fail 
to appreciate these things. If I am 
cordially received by the husband of 
the family, and if, one by one, I am 
greeted by the children, this daughter 
and that son coming and shaking hands 
with me, one saying what he has re- 
membered, and another saying what 
he has remembered, I am not insensible 
to the honor that is bestowed upon me. 
But they forgot the little fellow. He 
has been out in the nurse's arms; and 
hearing something going on, he breaks 
away from her and comes running in, 
and eludes the mother who would 
catch him up, and climbs into my lap, 
and talks of his hoop, of his marbles, 
or of something else. Dear little fel- 
low — he is the one in the whole family 
that I like best— the little prattler ; the 
one that takes liberties; the one that 
makes me as a father to him. 

23. The Father's Presence. — First, 
the child learns to love his father as a 
person in the household; but as he 
grows older he begins to see his father 
in the handwriting that hes on the sec- 
retary, in the chair that stands in the 
corner, in the hat and coat that hang 
on the nail, in the cane, in the gar- 
den, all through the house, and around 
about it — everywhere that his father 
has thought, and shown his taste, and 
performed his labor. He sees his 
whole personality. 

I well remember being waked up, 
on dreamy moonlit nights, by the 
whippoorwill. Its wild, strange song 
fluted through the air, and I was 
seized with I know not what inspi- 



8 



NATURAL LIFE 



ration. My soul exhaled, and I quiv- 
ered with a kind of pleasant terror. I 
would fain have called out, but that I 
did not dare to hear my own voice in 
tiie silence. The light of the moon, 
streaming through the window and 
filling the room, brought tears, half 
of pleasure and half of terror, which 
ran down my cheeks. Presently I 
heard my father's " Hetn!" in the 
adjoining room, — and then it was all 
peace. Just that simplest inarticulate 
sound, that brought quick through my 
fancy a sense of my father's presence, 
dissipated all terror. I was myself 
again in an instant. From this least 
hint and sign of personality, how quick 
the whole person came ! 

24. Judgments of Law and of Love. 
— Look at the way in which we see 
our neighbors' children. There never 
were such rogues ! There never were 
such little lying wretches ! There 
never were such mischief-making 
children ! My observation is that 
every village in the United States has 
in it the worst children in the world. 
When you bring to bear upon your 
neighbor's children any other stand- 
ard of measurement than that of ten- 
der, fostering love, you look at them 
with hard criticism, and the judgment 
of the law ; and they cannot stand it. 

Yet how is it with the father and the 
mother when they look upon their own 
children ? With what patience do 
they endure the animal period, the 
brute period, the deceitful period, the 
fox period, the wolf period, the serpent 
period ! 

25. Sympathy of Moods. — You know 
the old Latin proverb that says : 

Si vis me Acre, dolendum est 
Primum ipsi tibi. 

•• If you want to make men cry you 
must cry first." Whenever you see 
any one in tears you instantly feel a 



pathetic mood come on you. Or if 
you go into a house of merriment, and 
brilliant jests are flying through the 
air like rockets, you begin to laugh 
even before you know what the jest 
is. The feehng of mirth in another 
begets the same in you at once. So 
it is all the way through. I have 
known parents who, because their 
children have been angry, have got 
angry too. " You little rascal ! " they 
say. " What do you mean by losing 
your temper? Take that!" When 
the child is angry, that is the time for 
the parent to be gentle ; when the 
child is selfish, that is the time for the 
parent to subdue him by pouring 
generous treatment over him. If you 
want anybody to be anything, be that 
yourself in their presence, and they 
will incline to it. 

26. Sunday and the Children. — 
When I was a boy Sunday began at 
the going down of the sun on Saturday 
night. The next morning, when 1 got 
up, 1 used to feel the power and pressure 
of the stillness that prevailed, or of the 
strange sounds that rolled through the 
air. When I went to the breakfast table 
I felt that I must not smile ; and the 
first thing I heard was the question, 
"Do you know your catechism?" 
That was always the skeleton in my 
closet, — especially when my dinner 
hung on it, the loss of which, to a 
growing boy like me, was a serious 
matter ! In many ways religion was 
made a torment to me. Yet my father 
and mother were far in advance of 
their time in the gentleness with which 
they treated their household. But I 
can remember how I used to stand in 
the west window and look at the sun, 
and yearn to have it go down. It 
seemed to me that there was nothing 
so lazy as the sun on Sunday ; but 
when it did go down it brought 
emancipation. 



INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD 



My recollection of this is very vivid, 
and I should be extremely sorry to 
think that a child of mine watched to 
see the last sand go out of the Sab- 
bath, and felt that it was iron sand, 
and associated Sunday with fetters 
and manacles. It is a day of the 
Lord, and it ought to be full of sweet 
songs and rare pleasure. 

27. Children and the Old Testament. 
— Many parents do not dare to let their 
children go to the Old Testament. 
They say there are in it many things 
which shock the refinement of modern 
Christians, and which they do not 
want their children to see. There are, 
it is true, many things in the history 
of the race which are not agreeable ; 
so there are many things in the growth 
of every child that are not agreeable. 
Therefore we take him to the nursery, 
and do not show him in the parlor. 
But these things are necessary parts 
of life though they do not belong to 
polite society. There are parts of the 
Old Testament which do not belong 
to polite literature, but which belong 
to life, notwithstanding. Life has 
knots and twists in it which must be 
taken account of in a true delineation. 
Old Cromwell wanted to be painted 
with the wart which was on his face ; 
and the Old Testament paints the 
warts on the faces of its heroes. If 
parents are fastidious about the Old 
Testament, the consequence is that 
their children are weakened unless 
they get its reflected light, and are not 
half so strong as they would otherwise 
be. I would rather take my child by 
the hand, and walk with him straight 
from Genesis to the last book of the Old 
Testament, and read every bit to him, 
unfolding and explaining it, than to 
have him deprived of the power which 
comes from familiarity with it. 

28, Parable and Fable as Teachers. 
— Does a mother, when she has grown 



old, repent herself of the thousand 
little artifices by which she has at- 
tempted to get truth into the mind o-f 
the child? She reads a fairy story, 
and the child is perfectly bewildered, 
delighted, dazzled with it; but is it 
true ? No, it is not true ; and yet it is 
true : that is, it is not true in the lower 
realm of fact, but in the higher realm 
of imagination it is true. It never 
happened ; but then, it conveys an 
idea of happenings of a certain sort. 
You make up a little fable, an un- 
tedious novel, and rehearse it to your 
children ; and they ask, " Is it true ? " 
You can say, "Well no, it is not 
true;" or you can say, "Yes, it is 
true." Do you not know that some- 
times an untruth is truer than a truth ? 
— truer, I mean, not in the thing itself, 
but in the impression it produces on 
persons' minds. The history of the 
world shows that in the divine develop- 
ment of a system of instruction pre- 
cisely those methods were employed 
for the purpose of unfolding and carry- 
ing up men's ideas, and elevating the 
standard of their inward manhood, to 
a higher plane, which are employed 
in every rational family. 

29. Childhood Disciples. — There is 
but one period of the year in which you 
can graft well. It may be possible to 
graft successfully at other times ; but 
there is one period when you must 
make the transfer if you would take a 
bud from one tree, and graft it into 
another, and have it produce its kind, 
and do the best that it is capable of 
doing. There is but just one season 
when the bark Ufts easily, and the staff 
is in the right condition. 

There is a time, also, when the little 
human natures bud easily, and graft 
easily. It is possible to graft them at 
other times, by extra elaboration ; but 
more than half of the grafts will blow 
out, as the saying is. There is a 



lO 



NATURAL LIFE 



period, however, in which ninety-nine 
out of a hundred will stick and grow. 
For all the adaptations of the child at 
that time are such as to incline it to 
borrow its life from another. It is but 
the transfer of that which is its need 
and instinct from the blessed Saviour. 
And then it becomes a Christian 
child. 

30. Young Souls. — When once 
china or porcelain has been inscribed, 
and put into a furnace, and baked and 
glazed, you cannot rub the inscription 
off. It is too late then. If you want 
to rub it off, you must do it while the 
ware is in the " biscuit." When 
children come into our hands they 
are in the "biscuit," and we can in- 
scribe on them what we please. 

31. Present Duties for Children. — It 
was only yesterday that I saw robins 
that had just been fledged and coaxed 
out of their nests by their parents, and 
that found it easier to settle down in 
the grass and on the ground than to 
fly in the air. But grass and ground 
are no place for birds ; cats, vermin, 
and all manner of dangerous enemies, 
boys included, are around about them 
there ; and I beheld the parents' en- 
deavor to make them fly. With what 
clamor, with what vexation, with what 
torment, did they afflict their offspring 
till at last they provoked them out of 
the grass! As the young birds, with 
feeble and unpractised wings, slowly 
lifted themselves up, the old birds swung 
around them with continued clamor, 
and, bearing them up, apparently with 
a thousand touches, conveyed them 
to the branches of high trees, and 
taught them to fly from tree to tree — 
not down but up, rather. So, some- 
times stringently, always patiently and 
helpfully, will the wise parents of boys 
and girls hold them to duties for the 
present grievous, but afterwards to be 
their joys in life. 



32. Possibilities in Culture. — There 
are a great many plants which, if you 
take them in their wild state, show 
simply that they have the capacity and 
foundation for culture. Some of the 
choicest of our garden flowers in their 
wild state were very simple things. 

Look at the gorgeous family of roses. 
You shall not find in a state of nature 
roses that parallel the Teas, the Per- 
petuals, and the Mosses. These are 
all developed by culture. They have 
been brought to a high degree of 
beauty and fragrance, and some to 
an excessive degree of fragrance ; 
whereas in the state of nature they 
were simply sweet and pretty. Natu- 
ral roses are comparatively humble by 
the side of these cultivated ones ; and 
it is culture that has made the differ- 
ence. Yet there was in the wilding 
the power of development. And the 
child will respond as well as the rose. 

33. Sensitiveness of Children. — Your 
child is so sensitive that you cannot 
speak to it that it does not cry ; and 
you say, " I never shall bring up this 
child: it is all baby." You asked 
God to give you children, and you 
prayed that you might have children 
full of sensibility to all that was good 
and true and noble. He granted your 
request. He gave you a child with 
sensibility to love, to justice and to 
patriotism ; but in order to do this he 
had to give you a child that had a 
sensitive constitution, that would cry 
quick and laugh quick, that was like a 
May morning and that was the pre- 
cursor of a glorious summer and of an 
autumn full of rich fruit. What you 
call sensitiveness is perhaps the first 
development of genius in the child. 
Do not mistake the preparation of 
good things as being faults in your 
children. 

34. Long Words to Children. — Long 
words in regard to spiritual subjects 



INFANCY AND CHILDHOOD 



1 1 



are no more to a child's understand- 
ing than hailstones on a slate roof are 
to plants under that roof. You cannot 
make children understand anything 
without appealing first to what they 
have in them, and then from that to 
something a little larger, from that to 
something still larger, and so on. 

35. Teaching Truth by Fiction. — 
You wish to produce in your child's 
mind a conception of justice, and you 
make animals talk. You say, "There 
was a lion — one of those good lions, my 
dear — and he was walking one day in 
the woods ; and what did he see ? He 
saw a poor httle innocent lamb by a 
stream ; and there was a wolf — a bad 
wolf — and the wolf was saying to the 
little lamb, ' What are you drinking 
out of this stream for ? ' and the little 
lamb said, ' I did not know as I was 
doing any harm.' ' Yes,' said the 
wolf, ' you did know that you were 
doing harm, and I will tear you to 
pieces.' And the lion walked up and 
said . to the wolf, ' Stop ! you shall 
not hurt that lamb ; he has rights as 
well as you ; ' and the lamb was 
saved." 

Thus you show the child how a just 
monarch protects innocence on the one 
side from craft and violence on the 
other. Yet there was never a lion 
that did so, and never a wolf that 
stopped to argue with a lamb before 
eating it up. But that fiction conveys 
to the child's mind a vivid conception, 
such as you could never give him by 
any abstract statement, of equity be- 
tween man and man, between the 
strong and the weak, between the high 
and the low. Christ employed that 
mode of teaching. He taught by 
fiction. 

36. Lessons Taught by Children. — 
Never in all after life shall we repay 
the lessons which our children teach 
us. They inspire enterprise, indus- 



try, frugality and courage, as nothing 
else does. From rude and painful 
strife with nature men obtain relief in 
the love which they find when they 
come back to the household. The 
buried miner, from whose face the 
sunlight is shut out, comes forth at 
twilight weary and begrimed, with no 
expectation of honor or wealth, but 
cheerful and hopeful. He is going 
home, where the little children live. 
He returns again to his most unwel- 
come task in the morning, still with 
no expectation of honor or wealth, 
but only that through his patient toil 
the dear ones may live on. 

37. Conversion of Children. — Many 
persons are afraid of children's con- 
version. As though the conversion of 
a child that is free from the cares and 
burdens which you carry like a hump 
on your back was not more likely to 
be genuine than yours, if you give it 
fair play ! When little children think 
they are converted people say, " What, 
converted so small ? Christians so 
young ? Let us be careful. We will 
not take them into the church yet. It 
will not do to bring them along too 
fast. If they hold out we will receive 
them." 

Suppose, a child being born, the 
doctor should say, "My dear father 
and mother, it is uncertain whether 
or not this child will live, and I ad- 
vise you to put it out on the front 
door-steps and leave it over night. If 
it lives in the open air in January you 
may be sure that it has a good consti- 
tution, and you will be warranted in 
bringing it in and taking care of it." 
Thus you do a devilish work, and 
hope that God will do a good one. 
Those periods when children feel 
drawings towards higher things, and 
hear the call of God, are just the pe- 
riods when you should take care of 
them. It is not hard to make a tree 



12 



NATURAL LIFE 



grow right if you begin to train it 
when it is young, but to niai<e a tree 
grow right after you have allowed it 
to grow wrong till it is old is not an 
easy matter. 

38. A Child-Christ in the Child- 
Heart. — Many people, in bringing up 
their children in the nurture and ad- 
monition of the Lord, look with great 
suspicion on early Christian experi- 
ences. They are afraid of abnormal 
growths. They do not believe in 
children being really Christians, be- 
cause they do not see in the child that 
which they would look for in a ripe 
Christian. But if they would look for 
a babe Jesus in a little babe, they 
would find that there. And if they 
would treat the babe Christ as they 
would treat the babe boy, or the babe 
girl, and nourish it, and carry it in 
their arms, and rear it, step by step; 
if they would treat it as a little child 
embosomed and arm-encircled ; if 
they would shield it as it goes through 
all temptation and all trial, they would 
make straighter Christians, better 
branched Christians, more fruitful 
Christians, than those that are made, 
at last, out of old and bad growths, by 
lopping away the pernicious boughs. 
There never will be the ripest and 
most symmetrical characters in the 
Church of Christ till we learn to 
bring them up from the seed in the 
spirit of the blessed Master, 

39. Undue Anxiety for Children. — 
Parents may be so anxious for the 
welfare of their children that they have 
very little peace, joy, or trust in God. 
In order that our hearts may ring out 
to our children in the sweet music of 
true religion, those hearts must not be 
touched by worry. If you lay your 
hand upon a bell when you strike it, 
it is muffled, and the sound does not 
come forth. Take off your hand, and 
let the bell sound out sweet and clear. 



The heart must not be muffled by 
anxieties, fears and torments. 

40. Children and God's Handiwork. 
— I shall never forget what the chap- 
lain once said to me when I was at 
Mount Pleasant Academy. I was ac- 
customed to go with a burly EngHsh 
gardener, three or four times a week, 
and spend an hour or two in the gar- 
den where he worked, to delight my- 
self with the flowers. The chaplain, 
knowing what my habit was in this 
respect, spoke to me one day on the 
subject with a kind of solemn delicacy, 
saying, " Do you think an immortal 
being is spending his time worthily in 
looking after such trifles as these?" 
I did not know how to answer him 
then. If I had known what I know 
now, I should have said, "God spends 
his time in making them every year, 
and I am sure that I do not go far 
viTong in spending my time looking at 
them." I should be glad to have 
every child under my care grow up 
with the feeling that God made the 
flowers; that he made the butteifly, 
the worm, the insect, the ant; that he 
has a thought in the air overhead, and 
in the ground underfoot ; that wher- 
ever there is life or organic creation, 
there has been the touch of God's 
hand. 

41. Heredity. — A child whose par- 
ents have lived in obedience to God's 
law starts with a better chance for 
righteousness than any other. A par- 
ent says, with the most cursed selfish- 
ness known to humanity: "If I in- 
dulge in drinking or in lusts I am my 
own worst enemy." I beg your par- 
don; you are the worst enemy to your 
children. They inherit your indul- 
gences; they are cursed when they 
start on the stream of life, whose 
width and length no man can com- 
pute, for God says: " I will punish," 
that is the vote of nature, " and visit 



YOUTH 



'3 



the iniquities of the fathers upon the 
children unto the third and fourth 
generation." The children of thieves 
are born with an impulse to steal; the 
children of drunkards are born with a 
shattered nervous system, and with an 
appetite that is as hot as hell. God 
says to parents, " If you want your 
children to do well, by all the love 
that nature and grace give to a man 
for his offspring, take care of your- 
self." 

42, The Invisible Ministry of Chil- 
dren. — I can conceive of an artist who 
should paint, as some people write 
with invisible ink. He goes through 
a newly builded or a newly appro- 
priated house, and works, and seems 
to be marking on the walls ; but from 
his pencil nothing comes, no fresco 
either on the ceiling or on the sides of 
the rooms. He continues to work for 
days, and weeks, and months, during 
the winter weather, and then departs. 
And on some beautiful day in June, 
when the air comes to exactly the right 
temperature, and the constituent ele- 
ments are happily coincident, by 
some chemical action the artist's work 
is disclosed, and the house is filled 



with exquisite pictures, above, on 
either hand, all around. We walk in 
a trance of beauty; that which we be- 
hold is like the reproduction of a 
dream, or the incarnation of a poem. 
The house glows. 

Now, our children are little artists; 
and by their quips and pranks, by 
their mirth, by their earnest love, by 
their strange manner when knowledge 
dawns upon their mind, by their mo- 
ments of devotion, by their little pat- 
tering prayers, by the ten thousand 
ways in which they carry their daily 
life, they are filling the house, they are 
filling the air, with pictures which are 
never so beautiful as afterwards, when 
they are gone. Thus the dress that 
they wore, the book that their fingers 
thumbed and from which they got 
their first instruction, the place where 
they sat and looked up with a merry 
laugh, the couch that was theirs, the 
hymn that they sang — all these things, 
which were transiently marked by us, 
but which we had perhaps forgotten, 
begin to blossom out. Our memory is 
frescoed with the rarest and sweetest 
and most delicate of all conceivable 
truths and feelings. 



II. rOUTH 



43. The Critical Season. — Long be- 
fore the Amazon reaches the ocean, it 
has grown so wide that from the chan- 
nel no shore can be seen on either side. 
It is still a river, but with all the signs 
and symptoms of becoming an ocean. 
There is a period, beginning not far 
from fourteen, in young lives, when 
childhood is widened suddenly, and 
carries its banks so far out that man- 
hood seems begun, though as yet it is 
far off. The stream is ocean deep. 
Upon this estuary of youth the cur- 
rents are shifting — the eddies are 
many. Here are united the strength 



of the sea and the hindrances of the 
land. 

44. Misjudgment of the Young. — 
The class of '34 of Amherst College, 
from which I graduated, came to- 
gether; and to look upon the boys 
that were, and to see how the man 
that was the butt, that was at the end 
of the class, has after all been an im- 
mense success in life, is a matter of 
interest. I remember one man, who 
was so poor that he had but one suit 
of clothes, and they, I should think, 
were five years old; who was a dullard 
with his books, but endlessly good- 



H 



NATURAL LIFE 



natured, and therefore endlessly the 
mark for the pranks and frolics of the 
young fellows ; who had no genius, 
but did have that kind of plain good 
sense, and that homely knowledge of 
men and things, which are not con- 
spicuous. That man went into a par- 
ish, where he soon established himself, 
and for now nearly forty years he has 
maintained himself in the same place 
with growing influence and reputation. 

Right by the side of him was one of 
the most brilliant young men in the 
college. All his associates admired 
his wit and versatility. He was an 
object of universal praise, and he bore 
almost unlimited sway in his class. 
After his graduation, he betook him- 
self to the law ; and from that time he 
steadily worked downward. At last 
he died, having succeeded in nothing; 
and his friends were obliged to pay his 
funeral expenses, and to make some 
provision for his household. 

Thus, when we come together at 
these annual gatherings of our college 
classes, often the last are the first, and 
the first are the last. 

45. Youth's Voyage Beginning. — 
As sons and daughters approach the 
age of manhood and womanhood par- 
ents begin to experience new and dif- 
ferent anxieties. The whole future of 
daughters is dependent, in a measure, 
upon the companionships they form ; 
and parents go with them to their ma- 
turity very much as inland people go 
to the seacoast when they are about 
to send their children across the 
ocean. So long as they are out of 
sight of the sea it is a poetic thing to 
them ; but when they draw near and 
behold that some storm is on the 
shore, the solemn, distant sound 
thereof fills them with dread. As their 
child embarks and goes out upon the 
troubled waves, what wild and fearful 
shapes their imagination takes! A 



parent who is just launching a child 
upon the sea of life without any 
knowledge of what that child's fate is 
to be, feels much as if he were send- 
ing a child out upon the ocean without 
any knowledge of what the ocean 
may do, or what shall befall the child. 

46. Opening of Young Manhood. — 
The human soul, in this its real wak- 
ing, is like the dawning of spring in 
the forest. All things good and bad 
are quickened alike. The dove comes, 
and the hawk also ; the singing thrush, 
and the cawing crow; harmless insects, 
and stinging ones ; innocent worms, 
and noxious reptiles ! The spice-bush 
and the nettle ; the fragrant blossoms, 
and ill-scented, poisonous weeds, all 
move together and break forth into 
life. But as every day the returning 
sun, moving higher, brings on the 
summer, the things comely and useful 
gain ascendency, and the forest and 
the field nourish treasures for the joy 
of man and beast. Here and there is 
a noisome morass which summer only 
makes pestilential. At remote inter- 
vals rare spots may be overgrown 
with poisonous plants or waste weeds ; 
but these things are exceptional ; and 
summer brings, in vast excess over 
incidental evil, the richest stores of in- 
estimable benefit. 

All natures come to their manhood 
through some experience of fermenta- 
tion ! With some it is a ferment of 
passions ; with some, of the afi"ec- 
tions ; and with richly endowed na- 
tures it is the ferment of thought and 
of the moral nature. 

47. Right Use of Appetites and 
Passions. — As the difference between 
right and wrong lies in the different 
ways of using things, the best cure for 
wrong-using is right-using. When, 
having stood for weeks in his stall, 
the overfed steed is fractious, the way 
to subdue him is not to chastise him. 



YOUTH 



15 



It is not the whip or the cudgel that 
he wants, but the harness. Let him 
walk before the plow. Working is 
better than the groom's anger or whip 
to cure the intense development of his 
vitality. 

In respect to our appetites and 
passions, that are constantly liable 
to run away with us, if we undertake 
to cure them by simply checking them, 
evil results will follow; for although 
there is to be proper restraint in all 
things, yet the sure effect of an at- 
tempt to stop up the vein of a great 
natural appetite or passion is to make 
an explosion. And the way to over- 
come that evil which lies in excessive 
forces and tendencies is to find out 
something in which the application of 
those forces and tendencies will be 
legitimate and useful, and work them 
there. 

48. Virtue, of Slow Growth. — Virtue 
is like rye, which we have to sow one 
year and reap the next ; which has to 
lie over a good while. A man cannot 
grow virtues as he can mushrooms. 
Virtue is a thing that comes slowly. 
Virtue means conduct. It means 
habit. It is positive and affirmative. 
It is not merely not sinning; it is going 
higher yet. You that have been vi- 
cious in youth cannot be virtuous in 
old age without a long probation. 

49. Position Does Not Make the 
Man. — The impression is that if you 
can put a boy into this groove or that, 
the groove carries honor. It is sup- 
posed that the position will do more 
for him than he can do for himself. 
It is presumed that if a man goes into 
a liberal profession, he will be a liberal, 
large, fertile man. This is a false idea, 
and one which has proved to be a 
curse to many and many a young 
man. For, as soon as it is found that 
there is a pigmy in the profession, he 
is dropped out of it. There are five 



hundred thousand blossoms on one 
apple-tree, and perhaps three hundred 
of them bear fruit. And do you notice 
how it is with that big tree of the law ? 
It blossoms all over every year with 
candidates. There are a multitude of 
abortive blossoms, and only here and 
there one bears fruit. 

50. Natural Bent to be Heeded. — 
If the father is a, and the mother is 6, 
the child is not necessarily ad; and 
yet parents think it must be so. There 
are whole generations behind father 
and mother, and they are nothing, 
often, but a lens that catches the 
scattered rays of light, and brings 
them to a focus. There are the 
grandfathers, the great-grandfathers, 
and the great-great-grandfathers, of 
whose dispositions the child partakes. 
The consequence is that it is unlike 
the parents, and father and mother 
are perpetually asking, "Where did 
that trait in the child come from?" 
If a child has a strong tendency away 
from business in a family where the 
parents are both practical, they set to 
work to weed it out. God has given 
them a little poet that is being fledged 
to fly and sing and take the air for its 
realm; but the father and mother mean 
that it shall be a banker, and say, 
" What is this unprofitable tendency 
in our child?" The mother is firm, 
the father is stubborn as a mule, 
and they blindly use their strongest 
faculties, or their habits which are 
like faculties, to oppress and tyran- 
nize over the child ; and if they do 
not ruin him they make his life much 
less happy than it should be. 

51. Desiring and Choosing. — Choos- 
ing takes, not the thing alone, but the 
whole apparatus by which it is to be 
obtained. Choosing is not only de- 
sire, but the machinery by which de- 
sire becomes reality. Choosing al- 
ways carries with it something more 



i6 



NATURAL LIFE 



potential than mere susceptibility. So 
that when a man says, " I choose 
such a thing," it is as if he said, 
" I think that thing to be not only 
desirable, but more desirable than 
other things that are inconsistent with 
it; and so much more desirable, that 
for its sake I will give them up, and 
will apply all the forces that are nec- 
essary to getting it." There are a 
great many young men and young 
women who desire to be cultivated 
and educated. And if you were to 
ask them, " Do you choose to be edu- 
cated ? " they would say, "Certainly, 
I do choose to be educated." But 
no, they do not. They desire to be 
educated; but it is one of those de- 
sires which everybody is subject to. 
Myriads and myriads of desires we 
have which never ripen. And among 
all the multitude of desires that men 
have, there is only here and there one 
that amounts to a choice. 

52. Youthful Exposure to Vice. — 
You can conceive how one might, 
by early exposure to infectious dis- 
eases, lay the foundation, in every 
organ, of weakness and after-suffering 
through this whole hfe; and yet, no 
exposure of that kind can be com- 
pared with such exposures to vicious 
and criminal indulgences as shall pre- 
pare mischief and misery for all one's 
life — in soul and body too. 

53. Unheeded Warnings. — A man 
would not go into a plague hospital 
and innoculate himself with the plague 
when he knew that ninety -nine of 
every hundred that took it would die; 
but you do ! No man seeing twenty 
or thirty men attempting to walk along 
the face of a cliff, and all falling over 
and perishing, would follow them; but 
you do! No man seeing the flame 
and the furnace heat of the building, 
and one fireman falling through, and 
another, and hearing the word, 



" Stand off! " would go in ; but you 
rush in, even though the others per- 
ished before you. Here are men that 
think they can go down into the house 
of death, amid the lures of corruption 
there, and come out unscathed ; you 
are rotten already ! Men think they 
can play the part of a rascal and be 
prosperous in life; the halter is around 
their neck ! They think that they can 
drink, and cast off the danger; they 
are on the broad road, and not far 
from infamy ! 

O, slow of heart to believe the testi- 
mony of mankind, the testimony of 
your own experience, and the solemn 
word of God ! 

54. Amusement Discriminated. — It 
is with amusement as it is with food, 
whatever thing hurts you is, to you, 
sin. If you are so constituted that 
beef is very stimulating and fever-pro- 
ducing to you, it is sinful for you to 
eat that kind of meat. Why ? Not 
on account of any physiological doc- 
trine in regard to beef, but on account 
of the fact that beef Xwxns you. And, 
in reference to amusements, when, 
from the peculiar circumstances or 
education or position of a young man, 
it is found that any amusement is 
leading him away from morals and 
respectability and industry, that is 
enough. The general doctrine of 
amusement is for the community ; and 
if for any reason a particular amuse- 
ment should be foregone by any 
young man, it does not alter the doc- 
trine for the community, but only 
changes its application to him individ- 
ually. 

55. Enlargement of Recreations. — 
Our Young Men's Christian Associa- 
tions have bowling alleys and billiard 
tables in them. Why, twenty-five 
years ago a billiard table in a Young 
Men's Christian Association would 
have been worse than a bomb lit and 



YOUTH 



17 



going off. A gentleman went to New 
Haven (taking thither a son, and 
promised that two or three others 
would follow if this one turned out 
well), and a professor of the college 
was showing the admirable rooms and 
apparatus. Among other things he 
took him into the bowling alley. The 
gentleman said, " You do not mean, 
sir, that this is under the authority of 
your institution ! Forty-four years ago 
I was expelled from this college for 
playing in a bowling alley. Times 
have changed." 

56, Gambling. — A man may have 
some chance in a game of chance, but 
in gambling saloons chances are not 
allowed. A man who gambles for a 
living is nothing but an incarnate 
thief, a cunning thief, a perpetual 
thief — first, last, and all the time a 
thief. And his business is to steal. 
He has made stealing a profession, 
and is practised in it. He is ac- 
quainted with men's dispositions, and 
knows how to take them. And here 
comes in one of these green young 
men. He is exactly like a little fly 
exploring a big black-bellied spider's 
web, that says, " It does not look as 
though there was very much to be 
afraid of here ; I do not see anything 
that I cannot manage ; at any rate, I 
will try," and pitches in. And after 
he is once in, you hear one faint buzz, 
and that is the end of him ! 

57. Legibility of Evil Courses. — I 
would that the young knew how 
clearly these things are written. 
God's handwriting is very plain and 
very legible to those who have eyes to 
see. There is not an intelligent phy- 
sician that does not read, as he walks 
through the street, the secret history 
of the hves of those whom he meets, 
and that, too, without following them 
in their midnight career. 1 care not 
to have men come to me and state 



their secret courses ; I can read it in 
the skin and in the eye. There is not 
one single appetite or passion that has 
not its natural language, and every 
undue indulgence of that appetite or 
passion leaves that natural language 
more or less stamped upon the skin, 
upon the features, upon the expression 
of the face, or the carriage of the 
body. There is always some token 
that tells what men are doing, if they 
are doing anything to excess. Pride 
has its natural language ; mirthful- 
ness has ; goodness has. Nobody 
doubts this. So have the passions 
their natural language. Men think 
that if they commit their wickedness 
in secret places, or in the night, that it 
is not known. It is known, although 
no man may ever say to them, " Thou 
art guilty ! " 

58. Resist Beginnings. — When you 
stand and look at the sweeping flames 
of a prairie on an autumnal day, 
stretching leagues away, or at night, 
throwing a lurid light into the broad 
heaven above, you do not suppose 
that those vast flames were put there. 
The negligent hunter, after his even- 
ing meal, sat smoking his pipe ; he 
knocked a spark out of it, and it 
kindled, and grew, and he watched 
it, thinking that he might at any mo- 
ment subdue it by the stroke of his 
boot ; but it escaped him, and ran, 
and spread here and there and every- 
where, and swung on, and the wind 
caught it and nourished it, and it 
laughed and roared and crackled as it 
sped along, growing wider and more 
fierce, consuming harvest, fence, hut, 
and hovel. It took care of itself after 
it was once kindled. It had in itself 
multiplying power. Evil always has: 
put it out early ! 

59. Irregular Habits and Immoral- 
ity. — For newcomers to large cities 
there comes an utter breaking up of 



i8 



NATURAL LIFE 



the accustomed order of life. They 
who have been accustomed to observe 
stated hours now find no regularity. 
All hours are mingled. The day 
sleeps and the night wakes. To-day 
excitements burst over all bounds, like 
fires racing before winds on prairies ; 
to-morrow the fires are ashes, and the 
soul lies like a wide blackened heath, 
and by dangerous means seeks to res- 
urrect itself from its jaded sensibili- 
ties. The wild extremes of excitement 
— the too much of to-day and the too 
little of to-morrow — all tend towards 
moral collapse. Regularity is not 
morality, but irregularity is very apt 
to border close upon immorality. 

60. Youthful Excesses. — Men are 
accustomed to look upon the excesses 
of youth as something that belongs to 
that time. They say that of course 
the young, like colts unbridled, will 
disport themselves. There is no harm 
in colts disporting themselves, but a 
colt never gets drunk. I do not object 
to any amount of gayety or vivacity 
that hes within the bounds of reason 
or of health, but I do reject and ab- 
hor, as worthy to be stigmatized as 
dishonorable and unmanly, every such 
course in youth as takes away strength, 
vigor, and purity from old age. Every 
man that transcends Nature's laws 
in youth is taking beforehand those 
treasures that are stored up for his old 
age ; he is taking the food that should 
have been his sustenance in old age, 
and exhausting it in riotous living in 
his youth. 

61. Dissipation. — The victim of ex- 
citement is like a mariner who ven- 
tures into the edge of a whirlpool for a 
motion more exhilarating than plain 
saiHng. He is unalarmed during the 
first few gyrations, for escape is easy. 
But each turn sweeps him further in ; 
the power augments, the speed be- 
comes terrific as he rushes towards the 



vortex ; all escape is now hopeless. 
... A noble ship went in ; it is spilt 
out in broken fragments, splintered 
spars, crushed masts, and cast up for 
many a rood along the shore, 

62. Bad Habits. — A physical habit 
is like a tree that has grown crooked. 
You cannot go to the orchard, and 
take hold of a tree that has grown 
thus, and straighten it, and say, 
"Now, keep straight! " and have it 
obey you. What can you do ? You 
can drive down a stake, and bind the 
tree to it, bending it back a little, and 
scarifying the bark on one side. And 
if, after that, you bend it back a little 
more every month, keeping it taut 
through the season, and from season to 
season, at last you will succeed in 
making it permanently straight. You 
can straighten it, but you cannot do it 
immediately ; you must take one or 
two years for it. 

63. Ashamed of Christian Parentage. 
— Had Raphael reared children, and 
taught them in the spirit of his own 
genius, how impossible it would have 
seemed to us that they could have 
gone blushing out into the world to be 
ashamed of the gifts and rare develop- 
ments which would make them like 
their immortal parent ; but how often 
do young people who have been reared 
upon the knee of a saintly mother, 
from whose heart many an earnest 
prayer has ascended to heaven in their 
behalf, who for their good has rebuked 
their vagrant imaginations and re- 
strained their wayward impulses, and 
who has faithfully instructed them in 
truth and rectitude and good sense 
and duty — how often do such children, 
during the period which intervenes 
between their childhood and their 
manhood, find themselves ashamed 
of the presence in them of those 
elements which are their glory and 
honor ! 



YOUTH 



19 



64. Beginning Life Aright. — Where 
I first settled in the ministry the 
ground was low, and subject to over- 
flow sometimes from the great Miami, 
sometimes from the Ohio, and some- 
times from both. The houses, that 
were built in the early days of pov- 
erty, were low ; and generally twice a 
year — in the autumn, and in the spring 
when the snow melted on the moun- 
tains — the Ohio came booming down, 
and overflowed ; and men were 
obliged to emigrate. They found 
themselves driven out of their houses. 
Their cellars were submerged, and 
frequently the lower stories of their 
dwellings would fill with water. And 
they betook themselves to the table- 
land a little back, in boats. Why did 
they not settle on the table-land at 
first ? Then they would not have lived 
so low that when the freshets came 
and the river overflowed they would 
have to scamper, or be drowned, like 
a parcel of vermin. 

Men build low in moral things, with 
a like result. Why do they not settle 
so high that freshets cannot touch 
them ? The lower range of men's 
faculties subjects them to incursions 
and disturbances ; whereas, if they be- 
gan life by acting from higher consid- 
erations of duty and truth, they would 
be immovable, and nothing could 
drive them from their position. 

65. The Past Still Exists. — You 
think that one hour buries another ; 
but it is not so. You think that you 
have parted forever from the things 
which have passed by you. No, you 
have not. There is much in your life 
that you think has gone which you 
never shall part from. It has stepped 
behind you ; and there it waits. That 
which you have done is with you to- 
day ; and that which you are doing 
will be with you to-morrow. When 
the mason carries up the wall, the 



course of brick which he laid yester- 
day is the foundation on which he is 
laying another course to-day. And 
all that you do to-day on the structure 
which you are building will remain as 
a basis for that which you do to-mor- 
row. Young man and maiden, take 
heed how you build ! That which you 
are doing, the work which you are per- 
forming, you do not leave behind you 
because you forget it. 

66. Discouraging Young Christians. 
— Suppose I were, on such a day as 
to-day, when there are a thousand 
outbursting tokens of the coming 
spring, to sit down and say, " Well, I 
presume there will be, at least one- 
third of the time this season, cold east 
rains ; and they will blight ever so 
many strawberry blossoms. Probably 
they will come about the time the 
cherries are blooming, so that only a 
few of those will set. And doubtless 
there will be more aphides this summer 
than there have been in any previous 
summer to eat up the tender plants. 
Then it is more than likely that there 
will be great quantities of rose-bugs 
and apple-tree borers. Besides, there 
may be a drought that shall kill the 
plants, or there may be winds that 
shall shake the fruit off before it is 
ripe. Everything, I do believe, will 
go against me this summer." 

That is about the way some Chris- 
tians talk to young people when they 
are beginning to live a new life. 
" Now, my young friends, look out. 
There are a great many ups and 
downs in religious experience. You 
will meet with a great many tempta- 
tions. You must expect to bear a 
great many burdens. You do not 
know what wrestlings you may be 
called to go through." 

67. Young Christians to be Joyful. 
— When the young come to me, gay 
and happy, as if they felt that they 



20 



NATURAL LIFE 



were willing, for the sake of not being 
lost forever, or for the sake of pleasing 
God, to cut off their locks, to put 
away their smiles, to look hereafter 
very sober and downcast, not any 
more to be gay, to be very reserved 
and silent, I say, " Go away ! I do 
not want crows. I want birds of para- 
dise, canary-birds, larks. I want 
singing birds. And you cannot have 
your plumage too gay." 

68. Faith in the Church. — Young 
men, do not cast off the bonds of an 
early education. Do not throw away 
your faith, even if it is like gold in 
quartz. Do not throw away the quartz 
if it holds the gold. Do not be 
ashamed of religion. Do not be 
ashamed of churches. Some churches 
are like some characters, less finished 
than others. Some churches are like 
railways that run but a very few miles 
an hour, while others run much 
further in the same length of time ; 
but it is better to go on any railway 



than to go afoot ; and it is a great deal 
better to go afoot than not to go at all. 
I do not say that all things are just 
alike ; but this I do say : when you 
come to a comprehensive view of 
churches, they are made up of those 
who beheve that men must grow, that 
they must be set free from the bond- 
age of the flesh, and that they must 
vindicate their claim as sons of God 
and heirs of immortality. Join them. 
69. Youth and Immortality. — An- 
tiquity dreaded old age. The saddest 
things in Grecian hterature are those 
that indicate a longing for perpetual 
youth. It was a blind groping after 
immortality. What the ancients wished 
was that they might never grow old. 
Running all through fabulous history 
was the idea that the gods gave to 
their favorites the power of being im- 
mortal. But what was that, compared 
with what Christianity conceives to 
be immortality — eternal youth in 
heaven ! 



///. MAN AND WOMAN 



70. Adam as a Type. — Whatever 
may be set aside in the story of Adam, 
this remains : That man was not cre- 
ated an immutable and untemptable 
being, fixed as a crystal. A dove 
holds fast to the creative idea : it is a 
perfect dove from the beginning to the 
end. An eagle begins an eagle and is 
always an eagle. Everything runs 
after its nature unerringly, without 
mistake, except man. He is a fallible 
being. He has it in his power to 
make his condition, and to avoid evil ; 
but he is temptable and mutable. He 
is placed in circumstances such that 
he has larger sovereignty, with ple- 
nary power to determine his own lines 
of action. He is organized on a 
higher range than the mere animal. 
This statement is the fact in the alle- 



gory ; and it is a fact transcendent. 
Adam, who is represented as being 
temptable, liable to sin, and yet as 
having power to choose between good 
and evil, stands for the human race, 
as the prototype, the allegorical man, 
the first parent. He has a numerous 
posterity. 

71. Goodness the Measure of Man. 
— We measure things by the point 
wherein their superiority lies. The 
swine we estimate for fatness; oxen 
for strength and flesh ; dogs for scent 
and sagacity ; horses for speed and 
endurance. 

Now, man is to be measured by that 
which makes him man, in distinction 
from everything else ; and that is not 
foot, nor hand nor body, nor appetites, 
nor passions, nor economic or com- 



MAN AND WOMAN 



21 



mercial power. These are not the 
things that make him man. It is that 
which has been stamped on him — 
God's image — that makes him man. 
That part of his nature which intro- 
duces the moral element, right and 
wrong ; the spiritual element, invisible 
realities ; and the benevolent element, 
the very divinity of love. Here man 
must be measured. 

And our substantial judgment of 
what we are, what our character is, 
and what we are worth as men, is to 
be formed upon this high moral de- 
velopment, — You are worth just how 
good you are / 

72. Grandeur of Man. — There are 
men that never seem so noble and 
strong as when God has stripped them 
of all their possessions, and left noth- 
ing but themselves ; and the grandest 
thing there is this side of the throne 
of God is a man. If it be a thing that 
will carry one's name imperishable 
down the ages with Praxiteles, Phid- 
ias, Canova, or Thorwaldsen, merely 
to have made a simulacrum of a man, 
and have clothed it in beauty, how 
much more to be the man himself, in 
the clarity of reason, in the glory of 
moral nature, with a true conscience, 
with a beaming love, with absolute 
fidelity, with simplicity and truthful- 
ness, walking among men a bene- 
factor on every side, gathering that 
he may distribute, ripening his fields 
that he may have grain to give, to 
eat, and to sow again ! A man is the 
grandest thing this side of God — 
should be, for he is the son of God, 
and the heir of immortality. 

73. Beautifying of Character. — I 
have been edified greatly in watching 
the process by which china is deco- 
rated. The gold that is used in its 
decoration is ground, and it looks, as 
you gaze upon it, as if it were the 
blackest lampblack. When the artist 



takes the vase and cup into his hand, 
and applies the gold to them, it is as 
if he had besmeared them with black 
ink. And when, after they have been 
removed to the kilns, and stacked up, 
and scorched, and burned for hours 
in a relentless fire, they are taken 
forth, the gold has changed a Httle, 
but it still looks more like lampblack 
than like gold. But when the oper- 
ator has thoroughly rubbed and pol- 
ished it, all the black is gone, and 
only the bright, radiant gold is seen. 
And when men are ground enough, 
and burned enough, and rubbed 
enough, they will look bright. There 
are many men that are being ground, 
and daubed black, and burned, and 
burnished, in this world. If you were 
to go into the shop and see the work 
as it is going on, and then into the 
showroom and see the glorious 
achievement, you would not suspect 
that one was the result of the other. 

74. Human Variability. — A lily hits 
the mark every time. There is no 
difficulty in planting the seed and 
having a lily that will with certainty 
send up its stem and open its pure 
white flowers. No lily -seed ever 
opens a duck or a hawk or a black- 
bird, but always a pure white lily- 
blossom. Is it so with men ? Plant 
the seed. Up comes a malignant, 
ugly, selfish, embruted creature. 
Plant again. Up comes a round, 
laughing, gay, joyous, sunshiny crea- 
ture. Plant again. Up comes an 
intensely practical creature. Plant 
again. Up comes a low, sensuous 
nature. Plant again. Up comes a 
singing poet. Plant again. Up 
comes a genius for music or painting. 
As we plant, men unfold every con- 
ceivable diversity of qualities. If we 
plant lilies, the result is the same the 
world around, with no essential va- 
riation : but men, when developed 



22 



NATURAL LIFE 



from tlic seed, manifest traits wliich 
cIifTer from those of their immediate 
progenitors often as widely as it is 
possible for human nature to differ. 

75. Humanity and Cultivation. — 
What are men thinking about when 
they despise human nature, or disbe- 
lieve in it ? The richest plum that 
hangs templing from the bough sprang 
from the loins of the sloe, ages ago, 
sour and acerb in the woods ; but 
culture has brought it up to what it is 
now. Out of the loins of the crab-ap- 
ple, with its bitter sharpness, came all 
that generous catalogue of fruits which 
make our orchards so rich and beau- 
tiful in autumn. Out of the loins of 
the wild animals of the woods have 
come forth the tame animals that fill 
our barnyards and fields. We know 
that culture in certain directions will 
produce an improved breed of sheep. 
Culture took from the race-course 
the fleet courser, and changed him to 
a trotting animal. It is purely breed- 
ing that has done this. We have 
schools for the short-horned or the 
long-horned Devonshire, or the milk- 
giving Jersey. They are all the re- 
sult of the discovered fact that animals 
are capable of being developed one 
way or another. It is a low, humble 
school ; but men believe in that. 
They believe in development in stock ; 
and yet they do not know, when they 
enunciate this principle as applied to 
stock, that it is a principle which is 
universal in God's creation. And, is 
mankind, that is created in the image 
of God, and is the crown of all vital 
creation on earth, to be supposed to 
be unsusceptible of that which we see 
practised in every field and forest 
throughout every state and nation on 
tlie globe? Can I make a dove be- 
come the patriarch of the varied forms 
of dove life, — the fantails, the pout- 
ers, and the wide-flying couriers of 



the air, — and can I not make men 
different from what they would be if 
they were left in a state of uninspired 
nature ! 

75. Perfected Manhood the Idea of 
Creation. — Responsible individualism 
is the constituent element of govern- 
ment and of society, whether you re- 
gard society as framed of God, or as 
fashioned of man. It is not, then, the 
design of things that a man should 
simply go right ; because if to go 
right had been all that was meant, it 
would have been far easier to make 
all men go right by making them dif- 
ferently. No puppet goes wrong. 
Make a doll, put the machinery to it, 
and turn the crank, and it will go just 
as you mean it shall, every time, for a 
hundred times, and never make a mis- 
take ; but it is a puppet when you 
have got through — no more, and no 
less. People seem to think that to 
live about right is all that is required. 
Not at all. That is not the end. Liv- 
ing right is only the means to an end. 
It is an incident to something greater. 
The divine idea in the creation of the 
world, seems to me to be the develop- 
ment of manhood — bulk of being, va- 
riety of being, power of being. 

77. Man's Varied Aspects. — A tree 
is a tree to everybody, but it is not 
alike to all. It is one thing to a lum- 
berman, who looks upon it and thinks 
how much it will cut, and of its value 
in the market, quite irrespective of 
everything else. It is another thing 
to a poet, who sees it lift itself up on 
some mountain ridge, clean against 
the sky, black in the evening, and 
radiant all day long; to him it is 
like a hymn or a vision. To another, 
a weary traveler, hot and hungry, a 
tree is an arbor, a hostelry of enter- 
tainment ; and he sits down under its 
boughs with great delight. Another 
is an orchardist, and the tree that he 



MAN AND WOMAN 



23 



looks upon is fruit-bearing. Another 
man is a landscape-gardener ; and to 
him a tree is simply one element in the 
composition of that noblest sphere of 
pictorial art where the earth is the can- 
vas and trees and vines are pigments, 
and the landscape is the picture. But 
there comes a botanist, who may or 
may not have sympathy with all these. 
He studies the inward structure of the 
root, and its functions ; the bark, and 
its functions. The wood, the earth, 
and all the parts that go to make the 
tree are to him a living organism, 
complex, cooperative. 

All these, and many others, looking 
upon the tree, see a dififerent thing. 
To each of them it is something, ac- 
cording to that in the man and in the 
manner which sees it. 

Now, if a tree reveals itself with so 
many manifestations, how much more 
a man, in bodily structure, in social 
relations, in civic relations, in com- 
mercial or constructive relations, or 
still more from the psychological 
standpoint ! 

78, Liberty, Obedience to Law. — 
Did you ever think what a complex 
creature a man is, that he can live in 
the center of some six or eight sys- 
tems, wheel within wheel, government 
within government, and become so 
used to it that he can move in the 
midst of all these varying laws and 
requirements almost without thinking, 
automatically ? Yet such is the educa- 
tion of human hfe that it gives to men 
the power of moving right in a vast 
factory of whirhng wheels and spin- 
ning bands, and clanking looms, and 
all manner of machinery. Men learn 
it ; and the general education of life is 
such that when a man has come to 
maturity he carries himself so that he 
does not violate this law of the body, 
that law of social neighborhood, this 
law of civil government, and that law 



of business. He puts on, as it were, 
harness after harness, and restraint 
after restraint : and the more he puts 
on the stronger and freer he is ; for 
liberty is obedience to law all the 
world over. 

79. Manhood the Beauty of Man. — 
There can be no doubt (though there 
have been disputes among archaeolo- 
gists on the subject) that the Greeks 
colored and gilded the statues which 
adorned their temples. And undoubt- 
edly those statues were more magnifi- 
cent for being colored and gilded. 
But now that time has rubbed off the 
paint, and they are without a particle 
of embellishment, and are simple 
marble statues, they are exquisite 
still. That is the case with a man 
whose force lies in his essential good- 
ness and real manliness. Wealth may 
make him more beautiful ; but strip 
him of wealth, and he does not lose 
anything. The man is there yet. 

80. The Ideal Man.— When you 
consider the intricacy of a construc- 
tion like Babbage's calculating ma- 
chine, it tires your brain and you give 
up attempting to form a conception of 
it. When you consider the problems 
which are involved in a great astro- 
nomical calculation, they are so many 
and so intricate that unless one has 
rare genius and long practice they are 
insoluble to him. But no physical 
problems such as these are compara- 
ble to the difficulty which there is in 
the development of absolute power 
and cooperative harmony in the ideal 
perfect man. 

81. The Sin Against the Holy Ghost. 
— This is not a sin which one can com- 
mit by accident, and without knowing 
it. " The unpardonable sin " is not a 
single act, but a comprehensive state 
of mind : that is, a sin which applies 
to the whole condition to which a man 
has brought himself by repeated per- 



24 



NATURAL LIFE 



vcrsiuiis, and in whicli you may say 
his moral condition is broken down. 

No man ever becomes dissipated at 
once. No man, no matter what his 
experience may be, can become ut- 
terly dissipated in a week — and still 
less in a day or an hour. But a man 
can, by days, and weeks, and months, 
and years, become so dissipated as to 
have broken down his whole bodily 
constitution ; as to have sapped and 
sucked dry the brain ; as to have im- 
paired every nerve ; as to have over- 
strained every organ. Every part of 
a man's body may be utterly de- 
stroyed by dissipation. 

Now, there _is a dissipation of the 
soul which corresponds to the dissipa- 
tion of the body. It comes on by the 
perversion of a man's reason; by the 
perversion of his moral sympathies ; 
by the perversion of his choices ; by 
the perversion of his judgment in re- 
spect to things right and wrong. It is 
a gradually accumulating process. It 
is not a single act. It is the compre- 
hensive result of a long series of vari- 
ous acts. 

82. Cruelty of Man. — I do not know 
of anything else that is so cruel as 
man. Lions are not ; tigers are not ; 
wolves are not ; serpents are not. A 
lion was made to eat meat ; but he 
never kills any more than he wants, 
and he does not kill that for cruelty. 
He makes use of his power simply for 
the purveyance of his own necessities. 
It is only man that revenges. It is 
only man that studies cruelty, and 
makes it exquisite, and prolongs it, 
and carries it out with appliances of 
art. From the despot on the throne 
to the despot of the household, the 
race has carried vengeance, bitter- 
ness, wrath, hurtfulness, as character- 
istic of the whole. There has been 
enough blood shed by the hand of 
man to bear up the navies of the 



globe. When a lion sheds blood, he 
laps it up. When man sheds blood, 
he does not eat it ; it falls to the 
ground, and cries for vengeance. 
The earth has been wet with blood. 
Tears have flowed like rivers. This 
has not occurred merely once in some 
great cycle. It has been the constant 
history of mankind. Time has walked 
ankle-deep in tears and blood on the 
face of the earth from the beginning. 

83. The Evil Life.— A bad man, 
whose life is a failure in all its moral 
purposes — what is that ? It is like the 
burned districts in Charleston — which 
was the saddest sight I ever saw in my 
life. I walked up and down its streets, 
and took a lesson which, if I were to 
live a thousand years, would never die 
out of me. It was a city of my own 
land. I loved it as I love my own. 
The fire had devoured it. There 
stood the stacks of chimneys, gaunt 
against the avenging sky ; and there 
stood the tottering walls ; and there 
huge heaps of noisome materials, 
where reptiles resorted ; weeds grew 
rankly, and the dried stalks of last 
year's weeds grimly stood thick all 
around. Street after street was marked 
with emptiness and desolation. Such 
seems to me to be the life of many a 
man, all the ways of whose life are 
cumbered with the wrecks of the past, 
and all of whose plans at last shall 
perish as with an eternal fire and 
desolation. Oh, to live so, and to die 
so, and then to take the fate of the 
other life as best you may — how 
piteous ! 

84. Smooth Natures Admirable but 
not Attractive. — One loves to see a 
strong man regulated and good, but 
regulation ought not to stand in the 
place of great natural impulses in the 
right direction. We want the heart to 
think for the head as well as the head 
for the heart. A man whose banks 



MAN AND WOMAN 



25 



have been laid for him by nature, 
stone by stone, smooth and even, is a 
canal, whose waters are economically 
regulated, just enough for profitable 
use, and not a drop more. Every 
wave and swell is combed out, every 
wrinkle is smoothed, and every drop, 
seemingly, is walking down to the 
mill with a sense of its duty to turn the 
wheel around. Canals are very good, 
but men do not sing or make poems 
about canals. 

85. Unheroic Heroes. — A character 
that is perfectly round and balanced is 
never so interesting in its details as 
one that is fitful. Not that landscape 
which is smoothest is the most taking 
to the eye, but the roughest and the 
rudest. And characters that are well 
knit together do not catch men's ad- 
miration as those do that have chasms, 
and falls, and chfifs — strong qualities. 
It is always easier to live with a round 
and well-balanced mind, but we admire 
the other sort, and make heroes of 
them. So it is that the young and in- 
experienced are perpetually tempted 
to make heroes of men that are not 
heroic and that are unfit to be im- 
itated. And hence it has come to be 
a saying that the faults of strong men 
are the things that are the easiest 
copied. 

86. Spirit Races, beyond Man. — No 
one is prepared to say that there are 
not spiritual conflicts between realms 
of spirits which render it absolutely 
necessary that we should have a 
superhuman guide and leader. We 
are not the only people that were ever 
created. The habit of God's mind 
seems to be to take a germ, one root- 
idea, and to prove what infinite vari- 
ations it is susceptible of. Take the 
root-idea of ferns. In all the varieties 
of ferns there is a substantial unity, 
but the ways in which God writes that 
idea are many. . . . 



As a theme in music, consisting of 
a few distinct notes, which are heard 
plainly at first, when it is elaborated 
on the organ is only recognized now 
and then, sometimes as though it were 
the voice of a bird flying and hum- 
ming through the air, sometimes as 
though it were the sound of horns, 
sometimes as though it were the tone 
of a sweet flute, and sometimes as 
though it were all of these combined, 
but always with variations, so you 
will find that God, in every depart- 
ment of his creation, though he began 
with a single thought, in carrying it 
out evolved endless variations. 

When we come to man, are we not 
to suppose that the same thing is true ? 
Is it not reasonable to suppose that 
the divine creative capacity was not 
exhausted in making the numerous 
races of the globe ? Are we to sup- 
pose that what we see in this world 
is the sum of the literature which God 
has produced from the alphabet in 
which this was written ? 

87. True Manhood. — The Stoics 
held that the true type of manhood 
was that of one who had so trained, so 
seared, so hardened the heart, that it 
was like the inside of a blacksmith's 
hand, grown thick and callous, so that 
it had no feeling in it. The absence 
of suffering was the Stoical idea of 
greatness of nature. But the Chris- 
tian idea is the great power of victory 
in suffering. The Christian was sym- 
bolized by God in the burning bush — 
the bush unconsumed. The Christian 
idea of human nature was that of a 
man who, inspired by the Holy Ghost, 
stood in the midst of trial and danger 
stronger and happier while suffering. 

88. Faith in Womanhood. — I tliink 
I am more grateful to God for the 
sense that came to me through my 
mother and sisters of the substantial 
integrity, purity and nobility of woman- 



26 



NATURAL LIFE 



hood tluin for almost anything else in 
this world. After a long life 1 can say 
that I have not lost faith in woman. 
The longer I live the more chivalric is 
my regard for them. I should look 
upon it as a fatal symptom of canker 
in my soul if I fell from my confidence 
in the general trustworthiness, hon- 
esty, honor and chastity of woman- 
hood. Therefore, when I hear young 
men, or men in middle life, or old men, 
cast gross aspersions on the character 
of women, I feel as though I were in a 
den of hissing serpents. My soul, 
come not into communion with such 
men, abhor them, pass them by, for 
they are themselves far down in cor- 
ruption ! 

89. Reverence for Women. — Do 
you know why so often I speak what 
must seem to some of you rhapsody, 
of woman ? It is because I had a 
mother. If I were to live a thousand 
years I could not express what seems 
to me to be the least that I owe to the 
fact that I had a mother. Three 
years old was I, when, singing, she 
left me, and sang on to heaven, where 
she sings forever more. I have only 
such a remembrance of her as you 
have of the clouds of ten years ago — 
faint, evanescent ; and yet, caught by 
imagination, and fed by that which I 
have heard of her, and by what my 
father's thought and feeling of her 
were, it has come to be so much to me 
that no devout Catholic ever saw so 
much in the Virgin Mary as I have 
seen in my mother, who has been a 
presence to me ever since I can re- 
member. I can never say enough of 
woman for my mother's sake, for my 
sisters' sake, for the sake of them that 
liave gathered in the days of my in- 
fancy about me, in return for what 
they have interpreted to me of the 
beauty of holiness, of the fullness of 
love, and of the heavenliness of those 



elements from which we are to in- 
terpret heaven itself. 

90. Woman's Influence. — There is 
something wanting in the air when 
you get west of the Alleghany moun- 
tains on a sultry day of summer. The 
air east of the mountain is supplied 
with a sort of pabulum from the salt 
water of the ocean, by which one is 
sustained in the sultriest days of mid- 
summer. Now what this salt element 
is to the air, that is woman's influence 
to the virtue of a community. You 
breathe it without knowing it. All you 
know is that you are made stronger 
and better. And a man is not half a 
man unless a woman helps him to be ! 

91. The Women at the Sepulcher. 
— As in many cases, their hearts 
proved surer and better guides than 
their reason or their thoughts; for as 
a root scents moisture in a dry place, 
or a plant even in darkness aims 
always at the light, so the heart for- 
ever aims at hope and at immortality. 
And it was a woman's heart here that 
hung as the morning star of that bright 
rising of the Sun of Righteousness. It 
was love and fidelity that first found 
out the resurrection, and it was not 
the love of the disciple band — not 
even of John; but the deeper and 
more tender love of woman was the 
pioneer of discovery. 

92. Strength of Men and of Women. 
— Man assumes, the world over, arch 
supremacy. He forms his own judg- 
ment, and determines that woman is 
the inferior and weaker vessel, while 
he is the superior and stronger vessel. 
If you measure the base, man is the 
stronger ; but if you measure the 
top, woman is the stronger. If you 
measure the roots, man has the 
greater power; but if you measure the 
branches, woman has the greater 
power. In the solar flood, out where 
the leaves play with God's sunhght, 



MAN AND WOMAN 



27 



and the blossoms fill the air with fra- 
grance, woman is the stronger. Her 
moral nature and her affectional na- 
ture are stronger than man's. We 
men may be stronger than women in 
will and executive force; we deal with 
matter and worldly things as they do 
not; but those forces which deal with 
sentiments and moral truths are 
stronger in them than in us. Women 
are constitutionally stronger in relig- 
ious tendencies than men. It is not 
because they are weak but because 
they are strong that they are gathered 
under the ministrations of religion in 
greater numbers than men are; and it 
is not true that only such men are re- 
ligiously inclined as are weak of un- 
derstanding. 

93. The Developing Woman. — A 
woman's nature will never be changed. 
Men might spin and churn, and knit, 
and sew, and cook, and rock the 
cradle for a hundred generations, and 
not be women. And woman will not 
become man by external occupations. 
God's colors do not wash out. Sex is 
dyed in the wool. . . . Power and 
versatility will not change the social 
nor the moral qualities which we ad- 
mire in woman. Letting God take 
care of that nature of things which 
man is powerless to change, all that 
we ask is that power may be given to 
virtue, and that those ways may be 
free by which power is to be reaped. 

94. Consecration of Natural Gifts. 
— My second mother (the only one 
that I knew) was the stateliest, and 
the devoutest, and the most crystal- 
line, and the loftiest of women. She 
was undemonstrative in affection; but 
she was my very ideal of propriety, 
and elegance, and perfection, and 
taste. And yet I remember that one 
day when my father was playing on 
the violin (it happened to be an old 
melody that she was famihar with) 



in a neighboring room, and we were 
sitting in the dining-room, she came 
out on the floor (for she had been a 
belle, and had often tripped the light 
fantastic toe) and lifted her hands 
gracefully, and commenced dancing 
around the room. I had never seen 
such a thing in that house before. I 
looked on with astonishment. The 
color came to my cheeks, and the 
light to my eyes. And I have thought 
that if that mother had danced a little 
oftener, and said the catechism a little 
less often, it would have been a thou- 
sand times better for me. 

If you have gifts, whatever they 
are, of beauty, consecrate them. If 
you have the gift of art, consecrate it. 
If you have the gift of eloquence, 
consecrate it. If you have the gift of 
poetry, consecrate it. If you have 
the gift of emotion, consecrate it. If 
you have any gift, whatever it is, 
make sure that you root it in genuine 
sympathy, and that you exercise it. 

95. The Beauty of Woman. — God 
did not make so much of nature with 
exquisite beauty, or put within us 
a taste for it, without object. He 
meant that it should delight us. He 
made every flower to charm us. He 
never made a color, nor graceful, fly- 
ing bird, nor silvery insect, without 
meaning to please our taste. When 
he clothes a man or a woman with 
beauty, he confers a favor, and we 
know how to receive it. Beauty, 
with amiable dispositions and ripe in- 
telligence, is more to any woman than 
any queen's crown. 

96. Heroism of Silence. — There is 
many a woman who is heroic because 
she can hold her tongue. Ah ! do 
not laugh. You tie a man to the 
stake, and let Indians dance about 
him, and stick slivers into him, and 
with torches light them, and if he 
bears his suflfering patiently, do not 



28 



NATURAL LIFE 



you see that he is heroic ? And lei a 
woman stand where every inch of her 
nature, which is exquisitely sensitive, 
is subjected to the extremest torture, 
and let her in spite of it all manifest a 
disposition which is inexpressibly 
lovely, and stand patiently, and 
"having done all, stand," — is not she 
heroic? There is many and many a 
heroine by reason of the virtue of si- 
lence. 

97, Glory of Love's Servitude. — 
When the wounds of the sick are to 
be dressed, or when the offal of the 
hospital is to be borne away, if a man 
is hired who makes that his business 
for money, we put one estimate upon 
it. The under-hirelings of a hospital 
are looked upon as drudges. But 
when Florence Nightingale walks 
through the wards of Scutari, and 
with her own hands dresses the 
wounds of the sick, and bears away 
the offal of the hospital, or when, in 
our own land, a Miss Barton, or a 
Miss Woolsey, or any other of a thou- 
sand angelic women, performs these 
offices, tears drop from men's eyes in 
admiration, and we all feel that there 
are no words to express the gladness 
of our souls. The thing done is the 



same, whether done by a curmudgeon 
or by a saintly woman ; but, in the 
one case, it is done from the noblest 
love, from the most self-sacrificing 
humanity, and in the other, it is done 
for money, and by a man that cares 
only for the money. There are 
offices which seem disagreeable, but 
which, when done from a higher 
and nobler reason, so crown the 
head, that they who do them seem 
to wear an aureole around their 
brows. 

98. Womanly Strength. — Many a 
man has married a doll, and dandled 
her, and carried her ; he was a great 
engine working night and day for her 
support : but when bankruptcy struck 
him, and he lost his reputation, and 
was oppressed with fear lest she should 
break down, he became the babe, and 
the doll became the bearer. Lifting 
herself up in the midst of their trouble, 
by words of faith and by calm cour- 
age, she became the bishop and or- 
dained the husband to a new ministry 
and to a holier one. I tell you these 
silent forces in the heart — the graces 
of courage and of patience — are full 
of elements which are unrecognized 
in this life. 



IV. ROMANTIC AND WEDDED LOVE 



99. Love's Beginning. — On earth 
there is nothing more beautiful than the 
first breaking of the ground of young, 
strong, new, pure love. No flower 
that ever blossomed, however fair; no 
fragrance that any flower ever emitted, 
however sweet; no bravery of the sky; 
no witchery of art; nothing that man 
ever invented or imagined, is to be 
compared with the hours of dawning 
love in the young soul. And it is a 
shame that men should be taught to be 
ashamed of that which is the prophecy 
of their highest being and glory. 



100. Young Love. — First comes ac- 
quaintance — that is May; then friend- 
ship — that is June; then brother- and- 
sisterhood — that is July; and then love 
— that is August. But July and August 
are so much alike that no one can 
tell where one stops and the other 
begins. 

1 01. True Lovers. — Woe be to the 
poverty of our language, that we have 
no words to express the differences in 
the realm of love, from the topmost an- 
gelic nature to the poorest and basest 
nature. One single word is to serve 



ROMANTIC AND WEDDED LOVE 



29 



various uses, and impotent para- 
phrases are employed to eke out in- 
termediate meanings. But not they 
who have the gush of fancy, and still 
less they that have the wild flush of 
passion, are true lovers. They are 
true lovers where every faculty in one 
finds a corresponding faculty in the 
other; where the understanding and 
the moral sense of one are enriched 
by the understanding and the moral 
sense of the other; where the spiritual 
affinities of one are strengthened by 
the spiritual affinities of the other; 
where the sweet and pure social affec- 
tions are fed and pleased. They are 
lovers whose concordant, concurrent 
beings are like two parts of music, 
rising, and floating, and twining, and 
mingling to make one harmonious 
whole. 

102. Love of Man for Woman. — 
The most solemn hour of human ex- 
perience is not that of death, but of 
Life — when the heart is born again, 
and from a natural heart becomes a 
heart of Love ! What wonder that it 
is a silent hour and perplexed? Is the 
soul confused ? Why not, when the 
divine spirit, rolling clear across the 
aerial ocean, breaks upon the heart's 
shore with all the mystery of heaven ? 
Is it strange that uncertain lights dim 
the eye, if above the head of him that 
truly loves hover clouds of saintly 
spirits ? Why should not the tongue 
stammer and refuse its accustomed 
offices, when all the world — skies, 
trees, plains, hills, atmosphere, and the 
solid earth — spring forth in new col- 
ors, with strange meanings, and seem 
to chant for the soul the glory of that 
mystic law with which God has bound 
to himself his infinite realm — the law 
of love ! Then, for the first time, 
when one so loves that love is sacri- 
fice, death to self, resurrection, and 
glory, is man brought into harmony 



with the whole universe ; and hke him 
who beheld the seventh heaven, hears 
things unlawful to be uttered ! 

103. The Higher Life in Human 
Love. — In the spring it is not the root 
that starts the leaf and the bud ; it is 
the bud that starts the root. When 
the sun, shining on the outermost 
branches, excites in them renewed 
excitabihty, they draw for sap, and 
vessel after vessel, all the way down 
to the root, awakes its neighbor. Thus 
it is the top that creates activity in 
the bottom, and not the bottom that 
creates activity in the top. And in 
love it is the higher supernal element, 
which lies nearest to God, that, 
awakening, sends its vivific influence 
clear down to the very root of life 
itself. 

104. Harmony Essential in Mar- 
riage. — The man and woman that are 
to be married, should be put to the 
test of being able to bridle their 
spirits. Two persons that cannot 
agree with each other, and cannot 
agree with those outside of them, are 
not fit to be married. They light the 
torch of discord. The match is a 
sulphurous match, and is stenchful 
and suffocating, that lights their love. 
Persons that are in such close and 
intimate relations as those of the 
household should be concordant. 

105. Love Above Passion, — How 
pitiful it is to see men build too low ! 
I cannot bear to see the young gather- 
ing together and building their nests 
as the birds do. On my lawn I see the 
larks and other birds building in the 
grass, and know that before their 
young are fledged the remorseless 
mower, with revolving strokes will 
sweep the ground, and the nests will 
be utterly destroyed, and the young 
cut and wasted. And do I not see 
men building their nests just so? Do 
I not see love beginning to nestle in 



30 



NATURAL LIFE 



the flowers ? But the flowers them- 
selves are rooted in the dirt down low, 
close to the foot that easily shall crush 
them. No love is fit to be called by 
the name of love that has not in it 
something of the other world, and 
much of immortality. It must rise 
above an instinct or passion. It must 
have in it faith and hope. It must be 
a love that is served by the reason, 
by the imagination, by all that there 
is in the soul. 

1 06. Godless Love. — My young 
maiden friend, love is not a passion, 
but a growth. The heart is a lamp, 
with just oil enough to burn for an 
hour ; if there be no oil to put in 
again, it will go out. God's grace is 
the oil that fills the lamp of love. If 
there be one thing above all others 
that every woman should say to her- 
self in the beginning of her married 
life, it is this : "I cannot be respected 
and loved, as I must needs be to be 
happy, unless I can bring something 
more than myself. It must be God in 
me that shall maintain me in that dig- 
nity and fullness of influence and im- 
pressiveness that shall win and keep 
my husband's love." A godless 
woman entering into the marriage 
relation goes as a lamb to the slaugh- 
ter ; wreaths of flowers may be around 
her neck, but the knife is not far 
off. 

107. Brief Attachments. — We have 
a glimpse of the love of self-renuncia- 
tion in the earlier stages of that which 
terminates in wedded love. Every 
ingenuous young man and maiden, 
when they come together with a sin- 
cere and honorable affection, know 
some hours in which each is quite for- 
getful of self. Their thought of life is 
to honor each other, and to lift each 
other up, and to glorify each other. 
And that is the nearest to the angelic 
experience that these persons ever 



come. Alas ! that such love should 
be like the hyacinth. It throws its 
blossom up early in the spring ; and it 
is quickly gone, sweet as it is. Before 
ever May is half-passed the blossom is 
shrunken, a few brown leaves lie with- 
ering on the ground, and all the rest 
of the summer nothing but the bulb 
lies in the dirt. And so unworthy, so 
poor, so mean, is the termination of 
too many, too viany, of those attach- 
ments which began in honor, which 
went on in beauty, and which showed 
some touches of genuine love, in that 
there were hours, or days, in which 
true hearts loved with a desire to serve, 
and not to be served. 

108. Growth of Love. — Love comes 
to us at first vague, like the warm 
breath of the summer air when it be- 
gins to sigh along the ways of spring. 
Soon the buds will begin to appear ; 
then will come forth the early flowers, 
a few ; then ranks and multitudes of 
later flowers will be seen ; by-and-by 
the fields will be sheeted with them ; 
at length summer will wreath herself, 
in valley and on mountain, with rich 
harvests ; and at last the season will 
go out triumphing in the abundance 
of its fruits. And so is it with devel- 
opment of the feeling of love in us. 
When we are young, it is a mere flush ; 
and as we advance in age it grows, 
and first puts forth buds, then a few 
flowers, then multitudes of flowers, 
then promises of fruit, and at last a 
plenitude of fruit. The ideal is for- 
ever advancing. 

109. Wedded Love. — Love is the 
river of life in this world. Think not 
that ye know it who stand at the little 
tinkling rill — the first small fountain. 
Not until you have gone through the 
rocky gorges, and not lost the stream ; 
not until you have stood at the moun- 
tain passes of trouble and conflict ; not 
until you have gone through the 



ROMANTIC AND WEDDED LOVE 



31 



meadow, and the stream has widened 
and deepened until fleets could ride 
on its bosom ; not until beyond the 
meadow you have come to the un- 
fathomable ocean, and poured your 
treasures into its depths — not until then 
can you know what love is. 

no. The Ideal of Love. — Love is as 
gold in the rock. The mountain is 
but stone, and the gold is rare and 
scarce, and is found in veins here and 
there. So in this life it is in loving. 
We are too proud, too coarse, too 
selfish, too ungenerous ; we are not 
magnanimous enough. Love runs in 
veins through us ; and we are to take 
the experiences of love when it is in 
its most perfect moments, in its ec- 
static state, as it were purified gold, 
seven times purified and made clean — 
we are to take these as our ideal. 
Then we are to lift up, by the imagina- 
tion, our conceptions to a state in 
which our character will turn on this 
feeling, not occasionally, but as an 
ordinary experience. Nay, we should 
rise up so completely into the influence 
of the purity and disinterestedness of 
this feeling that it shall control all the 
other feelings, and harmonize them, 
till the conscience, and the reason, and 
the moral sentiments all are penetrated 
with the summer of love, as the whole 
atmosphere to-day is penetrated by 
the warmth, and fragrance, and beauty 
of nature. 

III. Early Marriages. — If the young 
man is willing to seem poor when he is 
poor, if the young woman being poor 
is willing to live poorly, if they are 
wiUing to plant their lives together like 
two seeds and wait for their growth, 
and look for their abundance by and 
by, when they have fairly earned it, 
then it is a good thing to come early 
into this partnership. Characters 
adapt themselves to each other far 
more easily in the early periods of life 



than afterwards. They Avho marry 
early are like vines growing together 
and twining round and round each 
other ; whereas, multitudes of those 
who marry late in life stand side by 
side hke two iron columns which, 
being separated at the beginning, 
never come any nearer to each other. 

112. Choosing a Life-Partner. — 
Natural traits are more powerful than 
artificial ones. A young woman may 
have an excellent experience in re- 
ligion, and yet make a very poor 
wife. When my venerable old presi- 
dent, Dr. Humphrey, was lecturing 
once, in college, he said : " In selecting 
your partners for life, first choose per- 
sons of naturally good dispositions — 
persons that are naturally cheerful and 
gentle. You will, perhaps, be sur- 
prised," he added, "to hear a minis- 
ter of the Gospel put cheerfulness and 
gentleness before piety ; but I am of 
the opinion of Baxter, who said that 
the grace of God could live with per- 
sons that he could not." 

113. Mere Feeling to be Avoided. — 
The law of feeling is strictly a law of 
use. Feeling, without anything to do, 
so far from being the life, is really the 
death of love. Well, it may exist, 
with great economy, for a short time, 
as a mere emotion. If you give your- 
selves up to the influence of the feel- 
ing of love merely, you will have a 
real intoxication for a short time, and 
that will be the end of it. You must 
understand that feeling, to last long, 
must develop itself in the line of con- 
duct. While you may not disdain the 
hilarity of disclosive feeling, you must 
understand that it cannot be long- 
lived unless it enters into the judgment 
and fancy, and fills the moral being, 
the whole life, and works for the ob- 
ject loved in a thousand ways. Then 
it is immortal. It is the very blood of 
your life. 



NATURAL LIFE 



114. Love Needs Nourishment. — A 
perfect union of hearts seldom takes 
place. It never does at sight. Peo- 
ple do "love at sight;" but it's just 
as the flint strikes fire. No flint makes 
a conflagration. All you can gel from 
a flint is a spark by which to make a 
larger fire. Persons have an idea that 
love feeds itself. Nothing feeds itself 
so little. When left to itself nothing 
starves so quick, or burns out so soon, 
so that only ashes remain, as love. 
That which men think they need least 
to nourish and care for needs more 
nourishing and care than anything 
else in the world — namely, the ele- 
ment of love. There is nothing that 
demands so much attention as the 
preparing of minds that love to love 
more perfectly, and throughout the 
whole scale of the faculties. There- 
fore, if those that are united outwardly, 
and in some points inwardly, are wise, 
they will both study and labor that 
this union may be carried through all 
parts of the mind. 

115. Measure of Love. — If you ask 
a man, " How much do you charge 
for a month's work ? " he will instantly 
tell you ; but if you should say to 
him, " How much do you think your 
love for your wife or your children is 
worth per day?" he would laugh you 
to scorn. You cannot introduce into 
the sphere of affection the law of 
equivalents ; for while in the commer- 
cial and material kingdom you pay 
with matter for matter, in the social 
realm you pay with love for love. 

n6. Counterparts in Married Life. — 
I need not say that the Rebekah who 
was courted at the well, who took the 
rings and bracelets, who went home, 
and, facing her parents, told them just 
what had iiappencd, who accepted a 
suitor that was five hundred miles off, 
and who, when appealed to as to 
whether she would stay a few days or 



go immediately, said, " I will go" — I 
need not say that she was not a woman 
that would be very severely governed 
by the mild, sweet-tempered Isaac. I 
have no doubt that there was govern- 
ment in that family, but I do not think 
Isaac maintained it ! . . . The law 
of counterparts was in force then, as it 
is now. We love that which we do 
not have but which others do have, 
and which makes up and completes us. 
A strong, vigorous man likes a sweet, 
delicate, twining woman for his wife. 
A vigorous, strong, manly woman likes 
a quiet, peaceful, unobtrusive man for 
her husband. 

117. The Wife's Influence. — It is a 
proverb that a man is what his wife 
will let him be. It is true that now 
and then there are men so strong that 
they control : but after all there is no 
art, nor cunning, nor device, nor 
strength, nor wit, nor wisdom by which 
a man can keep the heat of summer 
or the cold of winter from sifting 
through the cracks of his house ; and 
a woman's influence in the household, 
if she be not stormy and violent, if she 
be gentle, and especially if she be art- 
ful, sifts itself into a man's life as sum- 
mer air or wintry frost into a house. 
There is nothing to resist it. One can- 
not fight the circumambient atmo- 
sphere ; and yet a man might as well 
attempt to put it from him as to at- 
temj)t to put from him that influence 
which is in his bosom ; which is at his 
board ; which is in his morning ; which 
is in his noon ; which is in his night ; 
which comes at all unwatched mo- 
ments and at all times of weakness ; 
which has a pressure that is well-nigh 
atmospheric. 

118. Uncertainties in Wedlock. — 
How many there are of great excel- 
lence who deserve a better fate than 
they have found in their household ar- 
rangements ! So notorious is this that 



ROMANTIC AND WEDDED LOVE 



33 



it has been said that marriage is a 
lottery, and that some draw prizes 
while others draw blanks. But blanks 
are not so hard to bear, often, as the 
numbers that are drawn. 

iig. Disappointments in Wedded 
Life. — There comes a time when the 
maiden departs from her father's 
house. She is called, she answers, 
she departs. Ah ! how many visions 
of angels have there been ! but they 
were not God's angels. How many 
have gone out walking on flowers a 
little way, to find that the flowers 
changed to thorns ! How many have 
gone out from their father's house 
borne on the seraphic experience of 
love, scarcely touching the ground for 
joyfulness, to find little by little that 
love flowed away like a summer's 
brook, and left in its place but the 
bare channel and the gravel ! 

120. Ideals Under Trial. — So long 
as life is all smooth with men, it is not 
difficult for them to maintain their 
sentimental thought and spiritual in- 
spirations. It is when sentiment must 
be cultivated by moral endeavor that 
men fail. The experience of many 
persons who in girlhood and boyhood 
are full of the choicest aspirations, 
hungering and thirsting after higher 
things, is, alas ! in later hfe, like a 
house the morning after an illumina- 
tion and a feast. Every pane of glass 
had its candle ; but long before mid- 
night every candle has burned into its 
socket, and run down into darkness ; 
and in the morning there is but the 
unburned tallow and the remnant of 
wick. Thousands there be who look 
out triumphing over the glory of their 
home, thinking what a life shall be 
kindled up by the heavenly luster of 
their affection ; but when they tread 
the way of life, and selfishness, and 
envy, and jealousy, and disappoint- 
ment, and poverty, and afflictive sor- 



row, blight their affection, and they 
feel the yoke and the burden, and cry 
out day and night, " Who shall deliver 
me from the body of this death? " then 
how they change their social ideals ! 

121. Wives and Husbands. — 
"Therefore, as the Church is subject 
unto Christ, so let the wives be to 
their own husbands in every thing. 
Husbands, love your wives, even as 
Christ also loved the Church, and 
gave himself for it." I hear these 
passages quoted a good deal to show 
that wives ought to be subject to their 
husbands. I never hear persons say 
that a man ought to be to his wife such 
an one as the Lord Jesus Christ was to 
his church — such an one that by the 
amplitude and grandeur of his good- 
ness, by the richness and gentleness 
of his soul, he should pour over the 
object of obedience such a divine and 
blessed light that whether she would 
or would not she could not help look- 
ing up and rejoicing, and adoring. As 
Christ loved the church, and loves the 
church, so, husbands, love your wives. 
And the next time you want to read a 
passage of Scripture on the duties of 
wives to husbands, begin at that ! 

122. Wedded Infidelity. — A husband 
and his wife live together in the most 
intimate relations that can exist be- 
tween two souls in this world ; and 
when one betrays the confidence of 
the other it is between them that you 
find the bitterest feeling of revenge, 
because a blow from such a one is 
like a blow from the inside of a for- 
tress. We expect the enemy outside 
to fire upon us ; but we do not expect 
friends inside to betray us. We feel 
most grievously blows that are struck 
by intimates. We have opened our 
life to them, and that they should 
strike us seems like the grossest base- 
ness and treachery. Therefore, " A 
brother offended is harder to be won 



34 



NATURAL LIFE 



than a strong city," according to the 
wisdom of the wisest. Where an of- 
fence readies the center of Hfe, its 
effects are difficult to be obliterated. 

123. Permanency of Marriage. — It is 
clear that our Lord belonged to neither 
of the two schools which existed 
among the Jews, — the lax school of 
Hillel, or the rigid school of Shammai. 
He rose higher than cither. He made 
the outward relation permanent, on 
account of the true spiritual nature of 
marriage, it being the fusion or real 
unity of two hearts. Having once 
been outwardly united, they must 
abide together, and even when they 
found themselves in conflict must learn 
to be one in spirit by the discipline of 
living together. If they enter the 
wedded state unprepared, the house- 
hold is the school in which they are to 
learn the neglected lesson. 

124. Wealth Without Love is Pov- 
erty. — If a wedded pair have a house 
built, and silver and gold in it, and if 
they have all the florescence of art on 
the walls, and money flowing in like 
the waters of Euphrates on them, and 
all the service of music on every side, 
and are without mutual love, they are 
paupers — absolutely paupers. While 
if they have the glorious enfranchise- 
ment of true love and these things be- 
side, then they are like the candle, 
and their circumstances the candle- 
stick. But woe be to the man that is 
nothing but a candlestick ! 

125 No Marriage in the Resurrec- 
tion. — Useful as it is, it ceases and 
does not go on into the other life ; and 
it seems very natural, since man is a 
double being, born for this lower life, 
in transition and formation for a life to 
come, that a portion of the powers or 
faculties which fit him especially for 
this lower life, when they shall have 
performed their function, will, as it 
were, like the calyx of a flower, 



wither and fall back, and that into the 
other life wc shall carry only those 
parts of our nature, which are highest 
and noblest, and which have relation to 
the spiritual rather than to the physical. 

126. Homes Built by Hearts. — 
When birds build their nests, they 
first gather rude sticks and pliant 
twigs, and bend them to shape ; and 
then with mud, or glutinous secretions, 
they fill up the interstices. On this 
foundation they lay feathers and soft 
grasses and hair. When all is gath- 
ered and laid down, they settle them- 
selves into the rounded nest ; and, 
turning about and about, they smooth 
and finish the nest with their own 
breast. So it is with men that make 
homes. It is the bosom that does it 
finally, and not the bill nor the claw. 

127. Feeling in Action. — In mar- 
ried life man and woman walk down 
through the years, and love deepens, 
although its expression in the form of 
emotion may be almost entirely want- 
ing. As the rain falls upon the 
ground, and sinks, and disappears, 
but comes up in the greenness of the 
grass, and adds beauty to the blossom 
and the fruit ; so the rain of love, de- 
scending upon human hearts, is lost 
to sight, but comes up in action, and 
develops itself with power in events 
and deeds, 

128. Love in Service. — I have seen 
brooks that had nothing to do, and 
that flowed all day and all night full 
of water. I have seen other brooks 
that, though they seemed to have the 
same sources of supply, every day as 
they flowed down, grew shallower and 
shallower. Where was the water ? It 
went into the race on one side of the 
channel, and down into the mill, 
where it was set to work ; and far be- 
low it came back into the channel. 

I look at many people, and I see 
that their emotions do not turn wheels. 



MOTHER— FATHER— HOME 



35 



I know others who do not seem to 
have much feehng, but in whom all 
the practical elements of life suck up 
that thought and that feehng which 
exist in them in the form of a latent 
force. They are absorbed in the af- 
fairs of daily hfe. And so it comes to 



pass that frequently the best house- 
hold is not that where they have the 
most hallelujah, but that where they 
have the most order and system 
and kindness, and all that which is 
developed in the lower forms of 
good. 



V. MOTHER— FATHER— HOME LIFE 



129. Motherhood. — From the ear- 
liest days women have called them- 
selves blessed of God when life begins 
to palpitate within their bosom. Every 
one of a deep nature seems to herself 
more sacred and more especially un- 
der the Divine care while a new life, 
moulded by the Divine hand, is spring- 
ing into being. For, of all creative 
acts, none is so sovereign and divine. 
Who shall reveal the endless mus- 
ings, the perpetual prophecies, of the 
mother's soul? Her thoughts dwell 
upon the unknown child, — thoughts 
more in number than the ripples of 
the sea upon some undiscovered shore. 
To others, in such hours, woman 
should seem more sacred than the 
most solemn temple ; and to herself 
she must needs seem as if overshad- 
owed by the Holy Ghost ! 

130. Nobility of Motherhood. — No 
orator, no singer, no artist-worker, is 
to be compared with the mother who 
is carving the image of God in the soul 
of her little child. No mother need 
long to go out of the household, as if 
that were an obscure place. The Gate 
of Heaven is inscribed over every 
humble family. 

131. A Goodly Parentage. — It is a 
great thing to have been put into this 
life through a right gate. If it be a 
golden gate, covered all over with 
glorious inscriptions and legends and 
memories of past goodness, no man 
can thank God enough. Did your 
mother travail in faith and prayer? 



Were you born amid supplications? 
Were songs, not of angels, but of one 
scarcely less than angelic, round about 
your advent ? Were you baptized in 
your cradle before priestly hands made 
aspersion of water ? Did you come 
forth into life from out of a household 
of faith ? It is no small thing that God 
nested you thus, and that he gave you 
such a parentage and such a begin- 
ning in life. 

132. Transformation by Mother- 
hood. — There is a gay, giddy girl. 
Everybody says, " Radiant as a beam 
of light, and as evanescent." One 
predicts that she will come to this, and 
another that she will come to that — 
for the prophets of evil are more nu- 
merous than the prophets of hope in this 
world. At length, her time comes. 
She did not know what her capacities 
were, because she did not know her- 
self; but when love finds her, and 
wakes her up to her true life, and she 
becomes a wife and a mother, how all 
her gayety, all her vanity and all her 
frivolity are gone! How, rather, do 
they change themselves, and rest upon 
her like dew upon flowers ! How 
utterly is she transformed, and in the 
nursery how this mother becomes a 
new being ! Now all look upon her to 
admire — even those who once spoke 
disparagingly of her. She has learned 
in the state in which she is to be con- 
tent. 

133. Divine Slavery. — The day is 
drawing to a close. Through all the 



S''' 



NATURAL LIFE 



hours of it a slave has been moving 
about the house ; and now, as tvvihght 
comes on, hear the slave singing a 
hymn. And what is it that she is 
singing to ? It is a little nothing, 
called a baby. And who is this slave ? 
It is one fit to be an angel, in royalty 
of gifts and in richness of cultivation. 
It is Mrs. Browning, the poetess, noble 
in understanding, versed in the lore of 
ages, deep in nature, full of treasure 
such as no king, no court, and no pal- 
ace ever had. She sings. And when 
the little child is uneasy she serves it. 
When the child tires of the pillow and 
the cradle, it makes a pillow of her. 
And when she is weary, if the child 
does not wish to go, she still holds it. 
And when at last it will lie down, she 
still wakes for fear that the child will 
awake. In every single hour of the 
night she hears its call. Not a 
whimper or sound from the child 
escapes her notice. And she is up 
before the morning star. And, though 
weary, all day again this slave serves 
that little baby, — that little uncrowned 
despot of the heart ! 

Ah ! there is no slave out of heaven 
like a loving woman ; and of all lov- 
ing women there is no such slave as a 
mother. But remember what kind 
they must be. " By love serve one 
another." That is the coin that buys 
such slaves. 

134. Ideal and Real Growth. — If 
every child might live the life predes- 
tined in a mother's heart, all the way 
from the cradle to the coffin they 
would walk upon a beam of light, and 
shine in glory. Alas ! some are born 
like the dandelion— glowing bright, 
soon changing to a fairy globe, and 
by the first wind dashed out and 
gone ! 

Paint the man as the mother's 
thoughts do ; then paint him as he 
really lived ! Hang the two portraits 



side by side, and write, IV^ai he was 
to be ! and then, What he was! Life 
has no sadder contrast. 

135. Love Lightens Labor. — If one 
were sent to take care of the poor, 
miserable, wounded soldiers lying in 
the plague-stricken hospitals on the 
plain of Solferino, he would say to 
himself, " Money would not hire me 
to do it, but I must do it because it is 
my duty. Here are men who are suf- 
fering and need attention, and I am 
bound to look after their wants." 
But let me find my own son among 
those unfortunate creatures, and, no 
matter how loathsome might be the 
offices to be performed towards him, 
could money buy from me the privi- 
lege of ministering to his necessities? 
Could any motive induce me to leave 
his sight day or night ? That which I 
should do in the one case through 
conscientiousness, or from a sense of 
duty, and which would be a disagree- 
able task, I should do in the other case 
through love, and it would then be a 
pleasure to me. I should do it with 
delight. There would not be hours 
enough in which I might serve in love 
my wounded son. 

136. The Primal Source of Love. — 
I was at work among my grapevines, 
when my attention was attracted by 
two robins that were making a great 
racket. I was sure by their actions 
that they had young ones, that they 
thought to be in danger. And I said, 
"Why, you old fools! I won't hurt 
you nor your little birds." Just then, 
I heard a noise that I recognized ; and 
I said, " The cat is here." And sure 
enough, looking down, I saw the cat 
curled up under the trelHs. It was 
the sight of him that had set the birds 
all agog. " What is he doing here ? " 
I asked. He had no business there — 
and all the more, because I had just 
written an article saying that my cats 



MOTHER— FATHER— HOME 



37 



had been so brought up that I did not 
believe any of them hunted birds! In 
my indignation, I seized him by the 
neck, and walked off with him to the 
other side of the cherry orchard, and 
gave him an opportunity to see how 
it would seem if he was flying ! 

Well, about a rod from where I had 
been standing, in a dwarf cherry-tree 
crotch, two feet from the ground, there 
was the nest of these birds ; and in it 
were four robins. The cat had gone 
out there, and of course did not know 
that the nest was there, or it would 
have been destroyed. The birds, to 
whom nothing was so precious as that 
nest and its contents, inspired by the 
feeling of fear, were flying round about 
the cat to deceive him as to where the 
nest was, and endeavoring to draw 
him off as far as possible from their 
young, at times perilling their own 
lives, that they might save them from 
destruction. 

When I see these things, I say, 
" Where did that instinct of love come 
from, which we see throughout the 
world ? Birds take care of birds ; and 
as you rise in the animal kingdom the 
instinct becomes stronger and stronger. 
And where did it come from ? We see 
the same feeling exhibited among hu- 
man beings under the name of the 
parental instinct. And what are these 
various manifestations but so many 
fingers pointing upward, and saying, 
"The great God that made us and 
taught us to love, is himself the greater 
Love." 

137. Sound Bodies a Parental Ob- 
ligation. — There is many a man who 
will quench his fiery appetite with the 
cup, though that appetite will inad- 
vertently become a disease in the 
child. There is many a man that 
means to bequeath a foi-tune to his 
children, and will suffer for their sake, 
that they may have more of life's 



goods than he had, and yet he will not 
withhold his illicit passions, and will 
transmit to those children natures that 
will burn as if set on fire of hell ! 
Thus, by dishonoring their own bodies 
they dishonor also the bodies before- 
hand of their children. They give, as 
it were, not a temple, but a squalid 
hut, for their children to dwell in. 

138. Like Begets Like in Mental 
Action. — We see how it is in nature. 
Wheat tends to reproduce wheat. So 
reasoning makes a man reasonable. 
Loving begets love. Taste inspires 
taste. Sympathy invokes sympathy. 
Anger makes men angry. Hating 
makes men hate. What you bring to 
your pupil or your child he will 
accept at your hand. Gentleness, 
patience, goodness, of every sort, are 
indispensable for those who would be 
teachers or are parents. 

139. Mother and Child. — The mother 
is God's natural inspiration of youth ; 
and if she, by singing or telling 
stories or in any other way, brings be- 
fore the mind of the child noble men 
and noble principles, and keeps the 
child on the side of honor and in- 
spiration, he can scarcely when he is 
old depart from her instruction. He 
may for a time seem to lose sight of it, 
but ah ! those patterns that are woven 
into the very heart by the side of the 
cradle do not fade out. Even though 
they are temporarily hid, the colors 
remain. It is a living form in itself 
that the mother has wrought there. 
And when the hour of adversity comes 
the man has a distinct conception of 
what it is that he has fallen from, and 
comes back to it. 

140. Punitive Love. — Men think 
that if you preach that God is love you 
take away all possible spring of fear. 
Not at all. There is nowhere a more 
powerful and righteous administration 
of pain and penalty, than in the gov- 



38 



NATURAL LIFE 



ernment of a wise parent wlio loves 
the child so that it will not suft'er 
wrong in him. There is the whole of 
Mount Sinai in the hand of the weep- 
ing mother, and a whole Mount Cal- 
vary in her heart ; and the child gets 
them both. 

141. Judge and Father. — Here walks 
the stern judge with unrelaxed brow, 
and in a time that tries men's souls the 
culprit trembles before him, laden 
with crime. There is no escape for 
him. The attempt to balk the course 
of justice by bought attorneys is met 
at every step by him, and judgment 
goes on to conviction, and from con- 
viction goes on to condemnation, nor 
has he any power to turn off the sen- 
tence. It is very severe ; and the poor 
miserable culprit says, " There is no 
chance for me ; everything has been 
made to turn against me. The worst 
man that lives on the earth is this un- 
feeling and heartless judge, who has 
doomed me to imprisonment, and, it 
may be, to death." 

The judge lays off the robe ; he 
goes out of the court ; and as he draws 
near to his own house, what are the 
voices he hears? The chirp of the 
babe, and the laughter of the little 
children. As he goes in he is sur- 
rounded by his children ; and they 
take off his hat ; and they rifle his 
pockets to see what he has brought 
them, and he laughs and is merry 
among them. To them he is all joy 
and all bounty, the sweetest, dearest 
man in the world. Even his wife 
thinks so, and the children know it is 
so. What has become of him ? They 
have brought him to the level in 
which that part of his character can 
come out, and they dwell there for- 
evermore. The culprit chose to take 
the lower, and harder, and sterner ele- 
ments for his God ; he has got them, 
while to those who have risen high 



enough to take the love element, and 
subject themselves to it, or be obedient 
to it, to them there is no terror on his 
brow, there is no lightning in his eye ; 
and he is the all-clasping God of the 
tenderest love. His loving kindness 
and tender mercy are towards all who 
fear him with a wholesome love-fear. 

142. The Parents' Task. — The child 
is not to be either violently punished 
or suspected, though he steal ; though 
he rob ; though he be caught in dirty 
and bestial tricks. Why, we were 
born of the dust, and the dirt sticks to 
us, in a large measure, a good ways 
up. And for children beginning as 
they do, and where they do, it is not 
the less necessary that they should be 
drilled. It is all the more necessary. 
But it throws a light upon the task of 
the parents. You are not to think that 
you have another Nero in your cradle, 
you are not to think that you have 
another Catiline, when the child goes 
wrong. He is to be trained to the right. 

143. Perplexities of Parentage. — To 
take a ship and sail through Hell Gate 
of a dark night, when the tide is just 
ugly, and everything is forbidding, is 
considered a somewhat perilous under- 
taking. But to take the helm of a 
child, of a full nature, made up of 
contrary feelings, and steer it through 
the hell gate of life, which comes be- 
tween fifteen and twenty years of age 
— there is no such pilotage as that. 
No parent ever took a child through 
this devious passage without a hun- 
dred times feeling, " Ah ! it would be 
some comfort if the child only under- 
stood what I am attempting to do 
for it." 

144. Chastening Love. — As the sur- 
geon does not hesitate to use instru- 
ments to take out the ulcer, and if 
need be to burn it out, so the parent 
should not hesitate to do whatever is 
necessary to reclaim the child, though 



MOTHER— FATHER— HOME 



39 



it cause the child pain. That is a 
wise parent who so loves the child 
that he cannot endure to see faults in 
the child, and corrects them out of 
him. Love is like the old surgery, 
which took blood, that the fever might 
go, and that life might come. Love is 
no moonshiny, weak, pale light, car- 
ing for nothing. Love is a revelator ; 
love discriminates between right and 
wrong. It likes the right, and hates 
the wrong, and helps men out of the 
wrong and into the right. 

145. The Anger of Love. — I tell 
you there is no such indignation pos- 
sible as the indignation that means 
rescue, help, hope, and betterment. 
You might as well say that a summer 
shower has no thunder as to say that 
love has no anger. It is full of it, or 
may be. Has love no specialty or 
discrimination in removing error, nor 
any continuing, intense regard for 
specific and exact truth .'' God has it, 
and we are like him. We are his 
children, and know it by that. Love 
is simply that which overhangs all 
these powers, which gives them qual- 
ity and direction, and gives to us a 
larger power through these lower in- 
struments. 

146. Law and Love. — When the 
stern father overtakes the child that is 
at fault, and anger is on his brow, 
anger also is in the heart of the child. 
The intense firmness of the father 
kindles intense obstinacy in the child, 
and he will not bend, nor break, nor 
confess. But when the sun goes 
down, and the pain is over, and the 
obdurate child is gathered with the 
household in the evening ; when the 
twilight comes with all its softening 
influence, and he is alone with his 
mother, who loves him and wipes 
away the tears that she cannot keep 
from her eyes, and puts her arm 
fondly around him, and only looks at 



him, and utters no word of reproach, 
— Oh, how does that child, with a tur- 
bulent tide of feeling, burst into tears, 
and say, "Mother, I did do it — I did 
do it!" What the father's authority 
failed to extract the mother's look 
brought out. 

147. A Mother's Forgiveness. — Do 
you want a reason why the mother 
forgives her child the tenth and twen- 
tieth time ? Does not everybody know 
that it is because she is mother ? 
What do you mean by this, except 
that her affections are like a well that 
never dries, and that, though you 
draw ten thousand bucketfuls, always 
has a bucketful more, because the 
water runs in as fast as it is taken 
out? In a mother's heart is loving- 
kindness and forgiveness evermore. 

148. The Divine Fatherhood. — One 
thing is certain, nothing can wean the 
father's and mother's hearts from the 
child. They abhor the wrong courses 
of the child as much as any one, and 
as much as any one they see and de- 
plore the disastrous consequences that 
will follow if the leprosy is not purged 
away. Nobody feels so sensitive to 
the faults of another as they who love 
that other; and none love as parents 
do : and yet they are drawn towards 
the child while they see and hate its 
faults ; and there is nothing that they 
would not do to help it and save it. 

And does not the Divine nature, 
looking down upon our sinfulness and 
immaturity and unloveliness, feel to- 
wards us as the parent does towards 
the erring child ? 

149. The Prodigal's Return. — Why 
did not the companions of the prodigal 
go with him back to the father? He 
was not father to them. The prodigal 
recognized, under all his woe and 
want, that there was one that was 
father to him ; and up out of his deg- 
radation, up out of his vices and 



40 



NATURAL LIFE 



wickedness, he lifted himself. And 
why ? Because his thoughts ran bade 
to his father's house. It was /a//ic-r 
that vitalized hope, and inspired cour- 
age, and brought him back on his 
errand of repentance and restoration. 

150. The Mother and the New Birth. 
— Let it not be the father that shall 
first lead the child to the Cross. No, 
no ; the father did not bear it. He 
suffered no pain. He went through 
no fiery hour of anguish. He lost but 
little of bodily strength to nourish it. 
He has not hung over it with un- 
wearied weariness through days and 
nights. The mother did these things. 
And if there is anything that is pre- 
cious the mother should have it. And 
therefore it seems to me as though 
every mother should take the child by 
the hand in the new birth. Let her 
that went through all the anguish of 
the first birth have the inexpressible 
joy of leading the child to Christ for its 
new birth, that it may think as long as 
it lives (and that will be as long as 
God lives) "I was converted through 
my mother." 

151. The Madonna a Typical 
Mother. — I have my house full of ma- 
donnas. I suppose I have thirty or 
forty fine engravings of the Virgin 
Mary — the Spanish from Murillo, the 
Italian from a variety of artists, some 
from the old Flemish school, and 
some from the French school ; and 
my servants, who are mostly Catho- 
lics, I presume think if I am not a 
Catholic I am pretty near one. I 
look upon these pictures as represen- 
tations of the Divine Mother, and so 
do they ; but they think of Mother 
according to the teachings of their 
church, and I think of mother accord- 
ing to the universal instincts of hu- 
manity. 

152. The Memory of a Mother. — A 
man may go over all the world ; he 



may become a pirate, if you please ; 
lie may run through every stage of 
belief and unbelief; he may become 
absolutely apostate ; he may rub out 
his conscience ; he may destroy his 
fineness in every respect : but there 
will be one picture that he cannot ef- 
face ; living or dying there will rise 
before him, like a morning star, the 
beauty of that remembered goodness 
which he called " Mother." 

153. Revelations of Parentage. — 
Parents not only hold themselves, in 
all their occupations and pursuits, 
subject to the wants of their children 
in their infancy, but they begin to feel 
that there is an influence which shapes 
their business, their habits, and their 
very character, on account of the ef- 
fects which such shaping will have 
upon their households. No man 
knows himself till he has been called 
to stand in the relation of parent. 
Until then, one is like an unopened 
and unread book, or like a book read 
only on the title-page, or in the table 
of contents. Chapters and chapters 
there are in his own nature which no 
man reads or knows anything about 
till he is taught by his little child. 

154. Training to Independent Char- 
acter. — A child rightly brought up will 
be like a willow branch, which, broken 
off and touching the ground, at once 
takes root. Bring up your children 
so that they will root easily in their 
own soil and not forever be grafted 
into your old trunk and boughs. 

155. The Household. — To found a 
household is more than to build a 
church, and to be entrusted with the 
education of children is to have more 
than an altar or a pulpit. 

156. Home Influence. — The power 
of a home shows. It never lets go its 
hold. A mother has often reeled in a 
boy by the line of love, and a father's 
memory has brought many back. 



MOTHER— FATHER— HOME 



41 



157. Willingness to Begin Humbly. 
— I tell you, there are pleasures which 
many young married people miss. I 
would not give up the first two years 
of my married life for all I have now. 
I live in a big house, with a brown 
stone front, and very fairly furnished : 
but, after all, among the choicest ex- 
periences of my life were those which 
I passed through in Indiana, when I 
hired two chambers up-stairs ; when 
all my furniture was given to me, and 
was second-hand at that ; and when 
the very clothes which I had on my 
back had been worn by Judge Birney 
before me. We were not able to hire 
a servant. We had to serve our- 
selves. It was a study every day how 
to get along with our small means — 
and it was a study never to be forgot- 
ten. I owe many of the pleasures 
which have run through my life to 
being wiUing to begin where I had to 
begin, and to fight poverty with love, 
and to overcome it, and to learn how 
to live in service and helpfulness, and 
in all the thousand ingenuities which 
love sweetens and makes more and 
more delightful. 

158. The Family Make the Home. 
— You can see great progress in a 
house from the scaffolding to the 
walls, and from the walls to the inte- 
rior finish. Yet all these are nothing 
until the house is populated ; until the 
grandsire and the venerable matron 
sit by the fireside ; until the father and 
mother hold rule of love over the 
children rioting through the house ; 
until every day spins a golden thread, 
and life is made up of the fabric that 
comes from the weaving of it. 

159. The Price of Peace. — When in 
the peace and serene joy of the tran- 
quil household children sit around 
about the encircled table, how little 
do they know that all their delight 
and all their sweet peace has been 



purchased by midnight vigils, by ma- 
ternal tears, by parental strivings 
with God. We that buy our joy and 
peace by trouble sow seeds. Tears 
are God's seeds. They come up joys. 
It might almost be said that groans 
are the key-notes of joy on earth. 
Weakness is the beginning of 
strength ; humihty of exaltation ; 
shame of glory ; toil of ease. 

160. Large Families. — A child is 
not aggrieved because his brother and 
sister are older than he : he is glad of 
it. They are just what he needs. 
When he wants to go up he must 
have a ladder ; and the family is that 
ladder. The child next older is the 
first round, the child next older than 
that one is the second round, and so 
on till you come to the parent, who is 
the highest of all. Blessed be the 
child that lives in a family organized 
according to the principle that supe- 
riority is to minister to inferiority ! 

161. Potency of a Christian House- 
hold. — I regard a man and woman 
that come together in the marriage 
state as coming together in the most 
sacred of all possible conjunctions be- 
fore God ; and when they lay the foun- 
dations of a household, they are silently 
laying the foundations of a more en- 
during influence than any other that 
can be established in society. As their 
children multiply and grow up, and 
exchange all the immunities for a 
refined, civilized, and Christian life, 
they become a power for good to 
those around about them. Frequently 
a Christian household in the midst of 
a community is more potent than a 
Christian church. 

162. Home-Life the Test of Char- 
acter. — As we see great strong men, 
burly in their strength, dashing here 
and there in their enterprises, wise in 
the carriage of themselves, and ac- 
complishing great successes in one and 



42 



NATURAL LIFE 



another way ; and as we find, also, 
that they are honorable, just, disposed 
to be kind and good to their fellow 
men, we still have not come to the re- 
ality of them. Go home with them ; 
open the door of their house, and see 
the flocking of the children ; look at 
that ineffable light that comes over 
their faces as love rises up and informs 
every feature ; take the littlest ones, 
the beginners advanced above the 
cradle, the older children ; and yet we 
find that even that is not the very 
center. Deeper than that, and be- 
hind it all, is that love which means 
absolute unity. 

163. Home Blessings Radiated. — 
Oftentimes it is the case that a person 
can do work as a candle does, which 
gives light to all that are in the room, 
but, not stopping there, throws light 
through the window and along the 
road as well. What mothers and fa- 
thers do in their homes may be re- 
flected far beyond the human sphere 
to which they are confined, and bless 
many others besides their own families. 

164. Home-Character Tells. — I re- 
member one very excellent woman, in 
many respects saintly, a lover of meet- 
ings, a lover of prayer, and a lover of 
good people. She was universally 
thought to be a pattern Christian, ac- 
tive and useful. But her son, an edu- 
cated and intelligent man, was an out- 
and-out skeptic ; and I used to won- 
der at it. He went through two or 
three revivals of religion, but they 
seemed to produce no impression upon 
him. I made some particular inquiries 
as to what was the matter, and finally 
some one said to me, mentioning the 
familiar name by which this woman 
was known, " She is very irritable and 
inconsistent at home ; and it is what 
he has seen in her home-life that has 
impressed his mind that neither she 
nor anybody else is practically a 



Christian." There was that tempter, 
that impcriousness, that self-seeking, 
at home that overshadowed any Chris- 
tian virtues which she might have. 

165. The Christian Fragrance. — I 
love the smell of the Chinese honey- 
suckle. A man does not need to see 
it to know that it is in blossom. He 
knows it is in the garden when he is 
passing without looking over the fence 
or through it. He cannot help know- 
ing that it is there. And there are 
certain things that I see happening in 
society which I know a Christian had 
something to do with. I go into some 
houses, and though 1 see neither father 
nor mother, but simply the arrange- 
ment of things, and the conduct of the 
children, I say, "There is a honey- 
suckle here. I know it. There is a 
fragrance here." 

166. Unity of Spirit. — Every house- 
hold will tell you that the family may 
be one, and yet that all the members 
of it may be dispersed over the con- 
tinent. Yea, they may have gone out 
to institute new households, under dif- 
ferent economies and laws and lan- 
guages ; and yet there may be sub- 
stantial unity between them. Perhaps, 
on the other hand, some of you have 
observed cases in which a family have 
lived under one roof without a particle 
of unity, or as wide apart as if there 
were a continent or an ocean between 
them. For, bringing men together by 
the body does not make them one ; 
nor yet is it necessary to unity. In 
short, the only thing which can unite 
men is that interior, subtle, invisible 
spirit which constitutes the soul ; for 
men are united by the interior. Who- 
soever dwell so that they intersphere 
each other by their nobler elements, 
are one ; and whosoever, uttering the 
same creed, and performing the same 
ordinances, dwell apart in their 
thoughts and enthusiasms of heavenly 



MOTHER— FATHER— HOME 



43 



life and holy duties, are widely sepa- 
rated. 

167. Home-Selfishness. — How many 
households are there which every 
week, and perhaps every day, are 
scenes of ranlcHng, and irritation, and 
discomfort, and disputation, and from 
which happiness is mostly banished ! 
Now and then there is a radiant hour ; 
but there are more gloomy, east-wind 
hours than there are of the other sort. 
•• This house is mine," says the man ; 
" and if one cannot do what he has a 
mind to at home, where can he?" 
Nowhere ! The wickedest thing that 
a man can do, is to conspire to do 
what he has a mind to do, unless he 
has a mind to do what he ought to. 
We ought not to live to please our- 
selves : " For none of us liveth to 
himself." 

168. The Tongue, at Home. — A 
great many persons who are just in 
many things are unjust in speaking. 
A great many men who are cautious 
in their demeanor abroad, at home 
and in their own household are heed- 
less, and even rash. There are Chris- 
tian heads of families who shoot across 
the table from day to day words which 
stir up the worst feelings that men can 
have. Many children are brought up 
in the midst of provocations and quar- 
rels. Many and many a household 
has no free chimney which carries 
away the smoke of these conflicts, and 
the smoke falls down, leaving harm 
where it rests ; and there is a settled 
condition of unhappiness as the result. 

169. Sin of Bad Temper. — Many 
business men bottle up their temper 
during the day, and save it till they 
get home at night, and then make it a 
household confection — a luxury of the 
family ! This may seem like a small 
thing. It is small just as an aphis is 
small. In the summer aphides mul- 
tiply by milHons, and cover the leaves 



of plants, and weigh them down, and 
suck the hfe-juice out of them ; and, 
though each one is small, a million 
of them put together are not small. 
So it is with faults of temper. 

170. Quarreling, as Preparation for 
Heaven. — Suppose you were expecting 
now, every hour, to be called before 
God, and there was no longer any use 
of self-deception or disguises, how 
would you look upon those quarrels 
that have put you at odds with each 
other? Some families there are in 
which a quarrel never dies out. Or, 
if not in the household, then between 
family and family, neighbors and 
neighbors, fed, it may be, of envy and 
jealousy, or some remembered wrong ; 
the heart murky, unwilling to believe 
any good of an adversary, rejoicing to 
hear evil ; picking at faults, magnify- 
ing them, refusing to soften them, not 
taking into consideration who and 
what the person is, or what his temp- 
tations are, or what is justice, or what 
is truth, but simply indulging in fierce 
antagonism. How would such quar- 
rels look as a part of your garment 
with which to go before God ? 

171. Evil Temper. — Hear men talk 
about the seducer. They tell you how 
he creeps, how his eye gleams, how 
he sweetens his words, how he throws 
one web after another into the snare 
that he is weaving, and how at last he 
seizes and destroys his victims, hav- 
ing found before him a garden of 
Eden, and leaving behind him a des- 
olate wilderness. Everybody is ready 
to damn him. No words of condem- 
nation are so masterful that men will 
not apply them to this kind of destroy- 
ing the household. But there may sit 
in the household one who never eats 
too much, who never drinks too much, 
and who never steals, but whose 
mouth is an open crater and whose 
words are lava from a hateful heart. 



44 



NATURAL LIFE 



The children cannot live there hap- 
pily, the servants cannot live there 
happily, nobody can live there hap- 
pily ; they are in a constant tumult 
from week to week and from month to 
month ; and at last some combustious 
quarrel breaks out and the household 
is destroyed. One's ugly temper may 
work destruction in a household as 
much as another's salacious appetites. 

172. Love to God Means Love to 
Man. — A young woman came to me 
in great anxiety of mind, and waited, 
and waited, and waited for the ordi- 
nary development of religious instruc- 
tion to bring peace and rest in Jesus 
Christ, which came not with days and 
weeks ; until at last I made up my 
mind that there must be some secret 
sin in the way of her full enjoyment 
of religion. And on investigation I 
found that for three months she had 
not spoken to her father, although 
every day she had sat at the same ta- 
ble with him, in consequence of a 
quarrel which had occurred between 
them. My advice to her was, " Quick ! 
go home, and never come to me again 
till that quarrel is settled, so far as you 
can settle it, and until you have for- 
given your father. You must have a 
forgiving disposition, or you cannot be 
a Christian." She followed the ad- 
vice, and with reconciliation came joy 
and peace. 

173. The Home-Lover. — If you look 
at a watch, that which you see is the 
absolutely powerless part of it. The 
hour and minute hands that plod 
around regularly have no power in 
themselves ; and if you look under, 
and see the wheel that is next to them, 
that wheel has no power in itself. 
One and another and another of the 
various parts of the watch are neces- 
sary ; but not until you come to the 
barrel in which is the spring do you 
find where the force is in that watch. 



Now, it is the household that is the 
spring in many a man's heart. 

174. Family Prayer. — I would rather 
have, as evidence of piety in appli- 
cants for church-membership, the as- 
surance that they have daily house- 
hold prayer than the assurance that 
they are right on every point in the 
whole creed. That is soul-evidence. 
In the prayer of the household I think 
our affections have, as it were, a ce- 
lestial bath, where they cleanse and 
purify themselves. 

175. Heavenly Associations with 
Earthly Loves. — Father and mother 
and children, around the daily altar, 
learn to love each other with some of 
those tendencies that make love im- 
mortal. When our love is painted 
upon the horizon of time, it fades and 
dies out, and is but a fresco in water- 
colors, that we soon cease to behold ; 
but when we learn to associate our af- 
fections with the divine and eternal 
they grow immortal from the very be- 
ginning. For father and mother and 
children every day to twine together 
their affections for each other, is to 
consecrate their hearts one to another 
for all eternity. 

176. Sharing Home-Happiness Out- 
side. — Generosity is generally the spirit 
of horticulture. If a man has fine 
fruit, he is crazy to give it away, and 
he runs all over the neighborhood to 
find somebody to enjoy it with him. 
If a man has an abundance of choice 
flowers, he is not stingy with them. 
He enjoys them by giving them 
away. You say, "That is Sl natitral 
feeling." Well, what is a religious 
feeling but a natural feeling raised up 
and spiritualized and sanctified.'' I 
would have your homes made, not 
less, but more; but in making them 
engines of happiness, see that other 
people participate in that happiness as 
well as you. 



HEALTH AND SICKNESS 



45 



VI. HEALTH AND SICKNESS 



177. The Healthful Man. — A man 
in health is a fountain, and he flows 
over at the eye, at the lip, and all the 
time, by every species of action and 
demonstration. 

178. Health, Mainspring of Civili- 
zation. — A watch will keep time if it 
is broken in the wheels, and all the 
way through, provided you will keep 
your finger on the pointer and push it 
round all the while ; but of itself it 
cannot keep time. So a sick man 
may be kept up to a certain average 
of virtue, but it can be done only by 
a continual series of volitions; whereas 
it is health which makes volition un- 
necessary, that is the proper founda- 
tion for right action in life. And it is 
more and more so as civilization goes 
on. 

179. Action a Health-Giver. — Ac- 
tivity, whether of mind or body, is as 
indispensable to health as motion to 
the purity of water, or to the cleansing 
of the air. 

180. Eating is Engine-Running. — 
Eating is to the work of the human 
body just what the firing up of an en- 
gine is to traveling. Eating is a 
means to an end. It is not a habit 
nor a social custom merely. It is not 
a question of luxury. Do men eat 
stupidly, and simply because they are 
hungry ? You eat to make working 
force ; and as the engineer keeps his 
eye all the time on the steam-gauge 
to know the number of pounds of 
pressure, and to regulate it : so does 
a man eat, or so ought he to eat, all 
the time gauging himself. 

181. Marvels of the Body. — God 
made the human body, and it is by 
far the most exquisite and wonderful 
organization which has come to us 
from the Divine hand. It is a study 
for one's whole life. If an undevout 



astronomer is mad, an undevout physi- 
ologist is madder. The stomach, that 
prepares the body's support ; the ves- 
sels, that distribute the supply ; the 
arteries, that take up the food, and 
send it round ; the lungs, that aerate 
the all-nourishing blood ; the muscle- 
engine, the heart, which, without fire- 
man or engineer, stands night and 
day pumping and driving a whole- 
some stream with vital irrigation 
through all the system, that unites 
and harmonizes the whole band of or- 
gans ; the brain, that dwells in the 
dome high above all, like a true roy- 
alty ; — these, with their various and 
wonderful functions, are not to be 
lightly spoken of, or irreverently 
held. 

182. Duty of Health. — We are first 
to take care of the body, as the most 
precious gift that God has given us, 
aside from the soul ; and a man has 
no more right to squander his body, 
and waste it, than an heir, coming 
into his father's estate, and finding 
beautiful pictures on the wall, and 
magnificent statues in every niche has 
a right to deface the one or to slash 
the other. 

183. Degrees of Health, — I have 
often seen what are called over-shot 
wheels, where they have a very small 
and weak stream. They get a wheel 
of large diameter, and the buckets are 
made in a peculiar form, sloping from 
the mouth up. Then comes a little 
trickling stream which pours down 
into the big buckets its slow accumu- 
lation of water weight, and it begins 
to turn the wheel very moderately 
and gradually, and so it goes. That 
is about the condition in which aver- 
age men are working, with just enough 
power to turn an over-shot wheel. 
But if you have a great, full, strong 



4 ft 



NATURAL LIFE 



Stream, the mere impact of which on 
the wheel is enough to turn it, then 
the wheel is made under-shot, and 
the water comes dashing against the 
breast and bottom of it, and around it 
goes, promptly and rapidly. The 
miller says, "What do I care? I 
have got the whole stream. There is 
no use in economizing my water ; I 
will let it flow," and the water runs 
all the time. There are very few 
men that can afford to run on an un- 
der-shot wheel. 

184. Care of the Body. — I like to 
hear an engineer talk to his engine. 
I think the next things to men are 
machines like locomotives. If they 
should, by some accident, be trans- 
muted and become endowed with 
thought and intelligence, they would 
make grand men ! When I am trav- 
eling, the cars hardly ever stop for 
wood and water that I do not go out 
and see what the engineer is doing 
with his engine. I notice how closely 
he inspects the machinery. I have 
sometimes crept under the wheels my- 
self when something had given away 
and the damage was being repaired, 
and seen with admiration, how clean 
the very bottom of the engine was 
where nobody looked at it ; how all 
the axles and boxes, and other parts, 
were cleansed and in order ; and I 
have often said to myself, " I wish I 
could make my people take as good 
care of their bodies as this man has 
taken of his iron horse to-day." 

185. Vital Functions Agreeable. — 
The functions on which life itself 
mainly depends are clothed with the 
greatest amount of enjoyment and 
pleasure. No man forgets to eat, to 
drink, or to sleep. All of them come 
flowing with pleasure ; they please us. 
God gives the example of pleasing 
men. The eye and the ear are over 
against a constitution of nature which 



tends to give pleasure. It may be 
said that this, by a process of evolu- 
tion, is a mere conjunction of things ; 
but the tendencies of evolution origi- 
nated in God, and so through these 
mediums, it may be said, the eye has 
adjusted itself to like beautiful forms 
and colors, and the ear to take on 
sweet pleasure in sounds. 

186. Eating on Principle. — When 
riding on a locomotive, last week, and 
talking with the engineer, as I had the 
privilege of doing, I could not but 
think how much wiser men were about 
iron and steel machines than about 
fleshy and osseous machines. The re- 
lation of the pump to the capacity of 
the boiler ; the relation of the furnace 
to the size of the flues ; the relation of 
the cylinder, or of the steam generated, 
to the work to be done — all these 
things were in the engineer's mind. 
He was continually watching every 
part, and opening and shutting valves 
on every side, so as to keep every part 
in its proper condition. The stoker, 
or fireman, was applying or withhold- 
ing food, so as to keep the engine in 
just that state in which it would work 
best, according to whether we were 
running on an up-grade, on a down- 
grade, or on level ground, and ac- 
cording to the number and weight of 
the cars being drawn. 

How many are there who watch 
their furnace to see that they get in 
neither too much nor too little fuel ? 
Men shovel in food without any regard 
to what it is going to do ! If it is the 
Sabbath day, when they are quiescent, 
when they have less air and exercise 
than on other days, and when their 
stomachs are not in a condition to di- 
gest as much food as on other days, 
they eat a double portion. If it is a 
day when they are to undergo severe 
taxation and work, and when they can 
least afford to go without food, often- 



HEALTH AND SICKNESS 



47 



times they become anxious, and neg- 
lect to eat because they are so. Our 
food is a means to an end. It is 
simply the fuel with which we are to 
raise steam for carrying on the pur- 
poses of life. A man should eat on 
principle as well as pray on principle. 

187. Importance of Stomach to 
Head. — Your head is a machine, while 
your stomach is the furnace by which 
to generate steam, and if you do not 
take care of the furnace the machine 
will not work to any purpose. No 
machine, however exquisite may be 
its construction, is of any account un- 
less the motive power by which it is to 
be carried is adapted to it. And the 
motive power of the head is that which 
the stomach does for it. 

188. Physical Retribution. — In that 
salvation propounded by Christ Jesus, 
there is amnesty for the past, in so far 
as it is related to the mind and will of 
God. The pardon of sin never ex- 
tends to those transgressions that take 
hold of natural law. If a man, in 
drunken fury, has hewn off his hand, 
the penalty is not averted. If a man 
in a quarrel has had his face scarred, 
there is no pardon that restores the 
comehness of his countenance. The 
violation of natural law is inevita- 
bly followed by a corresponding 
penalty. 

189. Limited Forgiveness in Nature. 
— The principle of repentance, in its 
ruder forms, runs through even phys- 
ical things. A man may in regard to 
a great many matters transgress the 
law of health, knowing that if he stops 
and turns about, nature will forgive 
him. For instance, a person, through 
misconduct, has brought on indiges- 
tion, and he puts himself on a rigid 
diet ; and taking, day by day and 
hour by hour, his penalty, he gets 
back to a state of health, and by and 
by comes to feel as though he had not 



transgressed. Thus, there is to a 
limited extent forgiveness in physical 
and material laws, prefiguring the 
larger sphere of forgiveness in personal 
matters, as between us and God, or 
between us and each other. 

1 90. Sureness of Causality. — Pe n al- 
lies are often so long delayed, that 
men think they shall escape them ; 
but some time they are cei'tain to fol- 
low persistent violation of law. When 
the whirlwind sweeps through the for- 
est, at its first breath, or almost as if 
the fearful stillness that precedes had 
crushed it, the giant tree with all its 
boughs falls, crashing, to the ground. 
But it had been preparing to fall for 
twenty years. Twenty years before, it 
had received a gash. Twenty years 
before, the water commenced to settle 
in at some crotch, and from thence 
decay began to reach in with its silent 
fingers towards the heart of the tree. 
Every year the work of death pro- 
gressed, till at length it stood, all rot- 
tenness, only clasped about by the 
bark with a semblance of life, and the 
first gale felled it to the ground. 
Now, there are men who for twenty 
years have shamed the day and 
wearied the night with their debauch- 
eries, but who yet seem strong and 
vigorous, and exclaim, " You need 
not talk of penalties. Look at me ! I 
have reveled in pleasure for twenty 
years, and I am as hale and hearty to- 
day as ever." But in reality they are 
full of weakness and decay. They 
have been preparing to fall for twenty 
years, and the first disease strikes 
them down in a moment. 

191. Moral Teaching from Physical 
Pain. — The cramps following the ad- 
ministration of strychnine are a medi- 
cal lecture. The pains resulting from 
intoxication are a temperance lecture. 
The troubles which come from riotous 
debauch all of them speak in the 



4S 



NATURAL LIFE 



nomenclature of God's moral law, and 
all of them teach virtue, more or less 
taking sufTering for their text. 

192. A Living Sacrifice — the Body. 
— A patriot may perceive that his 
country may live by his dying, and he 
may offer himself for the welfare of his 
country, and the offering is a most 
noble one. Nothing can be conceived 
that is more noble than the despising 
and treading under foot the body under 
such circumstances. Nothing is fit for 
a gift except that which is worth keep- 
ing. By as much as the body is beau- 
tiful and powerful and noble in its 
right uses, it becomes fit to be offered 
up to God, in one's country, or in one's 
household. 

But what a wicked thing is the other 
kind of sacrifice which men make of 
their bodies ! What an awful thing it 
is for a man to count himself only fit to 
associate with the animal kingdom ! 
How many men there are who are 
burning secret fires of death within 
them ! How many men there are 
whose passions are poison ! How 
many whose whole system has been 
unstrung! How many who gluttonize 
life away ! How many who consume 
their Hves with intoxicating drinks ! 
How many men there are who, by 
various excesses, are taking out the 
pabulum of their bodies and destroy- 
ing themselves! And by as much as 
it is noble to make a living sacrifice 
of the body for a noble cause, by so 
much, it is despicable to make a living 
sacrifice of the body to lying courses 
and wicked ways. 

193. Appetites and Passions. — We 
often inveigh against the passions and 
appetites ; but they are God's funda- 
mental forces in this world. You 
might as well take the spring out of a 
watch as to take the appetites out of a 
man. All society would collapse and 
be worthless without them. Regula- 



tion, not annihilation, is what the pas- 
sions and appetites want. 

194. Bodily Health for Mental Vigor. 
— Never outrun health. A broken- 
down scholar is like a razor without a 
handle. The finest edge on the best 
steel is beholden to the services of 
homely horn for ability to be useful. 
Keep an account with your brain. 
Sleep, food, air, and exercise, are 
your best friends. Don't cheat them, 
or cut their company. 

195. Stimulants. — The best fire in 
winter is exercise, and the poorest is 
whiskey. He that keeps warm on 
liquor is like a man who pulls his 
house to pieces to feed the fireplace. 

196. Wrecked Health.— When health 
has given away everything is gone. 
The man is like a ship that has been 
driven ashore. It may not have 
broken one single timber, but it lies 
high and dry. The voyage is done, 
and the ship, as a ship, is dead, — only 
it cannot fall to pieces, but lies shrink- 
ing and warping on the sand. Such 
are multitudes of persons in the matter 
of health. 

197. Out-door Life. — You might 
dispense with half your doctors, if 
you would only consult Doctor Sun 
more, and be more under the treat- 
ment of these great hydropathic doc- 
tors, the clouds ! 

198. Ventilation. — An audience 
gathered together in ordinary assem- 
bly-rooms not only have no considera- 
ble portion of air which they should 
have, but in about fifteen minutes the 
fresh air has been all used up once, 
and as there is very little resupply it 
will very soon be breathed over twice, 
three times, four times, five times, and 
in less than an hour every man, 
woman, and child in this assembly 
will have in him something of every 
other man, woman, and child. This 
vaporous intimacy with each other's 



HEALTH AND SICKNESS 



49 



interiors is not wholesome, and yet it 
is almost universal. The filth of it 
never seems to have struck anybody 
at all. If you sat a man down to 
your table, and told him that ten men 
had eaten from that knife and fork and 
plate before he came in, he would not 
tolerate it for a moment ; yet they will 
go on breathing each other over and 
over and over again without the slight- 
est reluctance. But nobody thinks 
about it, and of all creation the men 
who think less about it than any others 
are architects. They make clean the 
outside and beautify the house, but 
within it is full of dead men's breaths, 
or the dead breaths of men. 

igg. Recreation and Work. — Re- 
laxation is oftentimes more productive 
than work itself. There be those who 
attempt to augment business by cheat- 
ing their sleep ; but nature always as- 
serts her rights. There be those who 
undertake to perform tasks without 
any intermediate relaxation ; but 
amusements and relaxations are the 
very things that make our hours prof- 
itable. For he who carves so steadily 
that he has no time to sharpen his 
knife, works with a dull tool, and can- 
not make much headway. 

200. Wrong Use of Pleasure. — 
Pleasure ought to be like a bath. 
One of the rules of hydropathy is, 
" No use of water that makes you feel 
worse is to be allowed; " and no in- 
dulgence in pleasure that makes a 
man feel worse is allowable to him. 

201. Moderation in Work and in 
Play. — As to the matter of waste of 
time, I do not think there is any more 
waste of time in amusement than in 
business. A man who works eighteen 
hours a day wastes time as much as a 
man who plays ten hours a day. I 
see men in my congregation who, I 
believe, are spendthrifts, not of money 
or property, but of their own vital 



economy. They are burning up in 
twenty years might and influence 
which God meant should last forty or 
fifty years. They are carrying in 
their lamps quadruple wicks which 
will not last long. So if excess is an 
argument against amusements, it is 
also an argument against business. 
But the rule is this : Judgment, con- 
science, and moderation in all things. 

202. The Death of Sleep. — Personal 
influence as developed in man is in its 
lowest form, on account of the small- 
ness of our nature and its undeveloped 
and unregulated condition ; but what 
an amazing power it must have when 
it is the being of God that exerts it ! 
So small is man that it is not safe to 
let him burn on, and he stops to die 
that he may live again. Every twenty- 
four hours there are deaths and resur- 
rections, as it were, by sleep, resting 
and cleansing the old life, to bring in 
the new life of the next day. 

203. Use Through Waste. — It is 
remarkable how the principle of the 
use and waste of one thing for another 
pervades creation. One third of our 
time is thrown into the sea of sleep. 
It dies, that the other two thirds may 
live to be of worth. For every two 
hours hving, and full of strength, 
there has been one sacrificial hour 
that laid itself down for them. 

204. Sleep, a Forgetting. — God has 
made sleep to be a sponge by which 
to rub out fatigue. 

205. Sleeping. — Never gauge the 
duration of your sleep by the time any 
one else sleeps. Some men will tell 
you that John Wesley had only so 
much sleep, Hunter, the great phys- 
iologist, so much, and Napoleon so 
much sleep. When the Lord made 
you, as a general thing, he did not 
make Napoleons. Every man carries 
within himself a Mount Sinai, a re- 
vealed law, written for himself sepa- 



50 



NATURAL LIFE 



rately. You nuist administer sleep to 
yourselves according to your tempera- 
ment, your constitution, and your 
wants. Something you may know 
presumptively, but principally you 
must learn by experience. 

206. Bodily Exercise. — Because 
Paul, looking upon that idea of man- 
hood which consists in throwing the 
javelin or the disc, in wrestling, etc., 
thought " bodily exercise profited 
little," they don't beheve in pamper- 
ing the body, or taking exercise ; they 
say "the body must be put under." 
Yes, you have got to put it under, just 
as a man puts a horse under himself 
when he wants to ride well and fast 
and far. But the body is part and 
parcel of God's gift to man, encasing 
the soul. The soul itself depends a 
good deal on what the body is. 

207. Recreation Necessary. — When 
the clock, performing day by day its 
duty, has ticked off six days, and the 
seventh day comes, it still measures the 
remaining time that is in its machinery. 
Each of the ticks with which it con- 
tinues to resound is almost nothing ; 
and yet one hour elapses, and another, 
and another, and another, and an- 
other, until, by and by, the last hour 
is reached, and the last half hour, and 
the last quarter of an hour, and the 
last minute, and the pendulum swings 
irresolutely, and ticks on one side, and 
ceases ; and the clock has run down. 
It did not need that one should throw 
a cannon ball at the clock, to destroy 
its timekeeping power ; it did not need 
that a club should strike it on its face : 
it ran down, tick after tick, by second- 
strokes. 

A man's life is going out in the 
same way ; and men need to wind 
themselves up by recreation. 

208. Physical Means of Grace. — 
Prayer, meditation, singing, social 
religious meetings, activity in doing 



good to others — these are eminent 
means of grace, and are to be ob- 
served by all with thanksgiving and 
assiduous fidelity ; but horseback 
riding, gymnastic e.\ercises, walking, 
climbing, boating — these, too, may be 
means of grace. They may not be, 
but they may be if they are properly 
used. They give health, and health 
gives an easy performance to very 
many of the Christian duties and 
Christian graces. There is many a 
man that by the help of the Bible and 
the saddle has gone to heaven with 
comparative ease, who would not have 
gone there easily by the help of either 
alone. It is taking care of the inward 
life by spiritual instrumentalities and 
taking care of the outward life by 
physical instrumentalities that is to 
make the whole man, and the whole 
man's life. 

209. Clean Athletics. — There ought 
to be so many clubs under moral and 
Christian influences that it shall be the 
fault of every young man if he joins a 
bad one. And that is true of all 
athletic games, of all gymnastic asso- 
ciations, of all clubs for ball playing, 
of bowling alleys. The time has come 
when, if a man goes to a bad place, it 
is because he chooses to associate with 
bad company. There is not more 
natural thirst in rolling tenpins than in 
hoeing in a flower-garden. There is 
no more necessity of dissipation in 
connection with this pastime than there 
is in connection with work on a farm. 
If intemperance is the danger, it is to 
be met by having places where intox- 
icating drinks are excluded. 

210. The Body for Earth. — It is 
born for the dust. Its nature was 
stamped upon it when it was framed. 
The tomb can never be overleaped by 
any one in his body. The sepulcher 
stands as a sieve to sift the world, and 
no man shall bear flesh and blood 



HEALTH AND SICKNESS 



51 



through it. Every man bids farewell 
to the physical part of himself at the 
bounds of the grave. 

211. Spiritual Poverty. — He is rich 
who is inwardly rich. He is poor who 
is inwardly poor. They that care for 
the body only, are like gardeners who 
fill their conservatory with flower-pots, 
and these with compost, but forget to 
put seeds therein, or flowers. Dirt 
and pottery are all the flowers they 
have. 

212. Illness. — God's flower-bed is 
oftentimes your sick bed. Joy, pa- 
tience, and faith that looks beyond the 
visible, are better than any outward 
achievement. 

213. Pain by Divine Intention. — 
Sensibility is the evidence of the ex- 
istence of nerve ; and nerve-life is the 
distinguishing difference between the 
vegetable and the animal. As you go 
down and nerve decreases, so capacity, 
and so quantity of existence, decreases. 
Or, taking the reverse, as you go up 
from the very lowest development of 
life, you will find that you come to a 
new development of that existence 
which we call nerve, but which is the 
ground and root of sensibility, whether 
of pleasure or of pain. Pleasure and 
pain are the two factors of sensation ; 
and they grow first to consciousness ; 
then to volition ; then to character ; 
and so to final ripeness. 

Pain is not, then, a discord, nor an 
accident. It is a part of the original 
constitution of things. If you imagine 
a being, as the world has been made, 
that has no pain, you imagine a being 
that has no existence as a sentient or 
possibly intelligent creature. 

214. Teaching of Sickness. — There 
are many men whom nothing will 
humble so quickly and completely as 
sickness. Take a great, square-built 
man, who, with his immense broad 
sides, sweeps like a frigate down the 



street, and scorns help, aiding every- 
body, and receiving help from none, 
— and let him fall a prey to disease, 
and hang like a rag without power to 
open his mouth, or to knock a fly off 
his face when it alights there ; let him 
find himself so reduced that he is ab- 
solutely like a child, and it humbles 
him. It makes him feel that he is re- 
duced to nothing. Sometimes sick- 
ness is better than sermons or reflec- 
tion to make men feel how little they 
are, after all, and to teach them the 
necessity of falling back for strength 
upon some power higher than them- 
selves. 

215. Teaching of Physical Pain. — 
It teaches men patience ; it teaches 
men to bear valiantly. Many and 
many a man has been burned at the 
stake without so much suffering as a 
man has had in his bed through ten 
or fifteen years' suffering and pain, 
and if during all that time while the 
body anguished, the soul is learning 
self-control, endurance, bravery, faith, 
even physical pain becomes a mis- 
sionary and a minister of grace. 
Cheerfulness under physical suffering 
is a wonderful victory, repining is a 
defeat. I suppose that there is more 
martyrdom of a quiescent kind than 
there ever was of a flaming. I would 
rather be broken on the wheel out- 
right — horrible as it is, yet it has this 
benefaction in it, it is immediate and 
you get through it pretty quickly — 
than have the gout. A gouty man is 
broken on the wheel through days and 
nights with no terminable period be- 
fore him, again and again with recur- 
rent anguish. A man who being a 
martyr in suffering for a principle is 
inspired with heroism, and can go to 
the stake and bear torments is not so 
great as the man that without pub- 
licity and without any great moral end 
in view nevertheless has courage and 



52 



NATURAL LIFE 



endurunce to bear up under these 
various bodily tortures. 

216. Sickness, Remorse of Body. — 
With very few exceptions sickness is 
the testimony of God to a man tliat he 
has violated natural law. Sickness is 
a punishment for the abuse of the 
body, just as remorse of conscience is 
punishment for the violation of any 
known law of conduct. God meant 
that the world should be full of healthy 
men, and it is a flagrant sin for a man 
to fall from obedience to the laws of 
health. 

217. The Temple of God. — Far be 
it from me to say that all sickness is 
disgraceful. Much of it is honorable. 
They that have made a living sacrifice 
of their body to love or patriotism 
have offered up the noblest thing that 
one can well offer. As in our streets 
there are many men whom we almost 
envy because they limp ; as there is 
many an empty sleeve that fires the 
heart as no physically perfect man 
could ; so there are those who have 
broken down in the service of love and 
the cause of humanity, for whom we 
feel reverence, and whom we honor. 
But they that are prematurely old by 
reason of an unnecessary waste of 
life ; they that by neglect, by defile- 
ment through the passions, have un- 
roofed this temple, and broken its fair 
cornices, and shattered its beautiful 
statues, and cast down its pillars, 
have indeed degraded the temple of 
God. 

218. Love-Light in Darkness. — 
When the mother gives away her 
daughter at the altar, she does not 
feel towards her half the motherliness 
which she does when she is trying to 
save her on the couch in the trial of 
death. It is in darkness that love 
flames, and has wondrous power, 

219. Heroism in Sickness. — Some 
of God's most heroic soldiers are the 



bed-ridden. Look at that sweet child 
of eighteen, full of aspiration and 
hope, to whom has been denied, not 
loving father, not loving mother, not 
sisters and more than anxious broth- 
ers, but health. She has made a 
weary fight for one year, for two 
years, for three years, and at last she 
says, " If God has planted me to grow 
as a nightshade here ; if I am to be a 
flower in the forest, that knows no 
sun ; if it is here that God wants me 
to show patience and zeal, then I am 
content with my lot ; I accept it, and 
I will ask and expect nothing more. 
Let this be my sphere of duty, and let 
my life be spent on the bed, the 
couch, the cot, if God wishes it. If 
sickness be God's will, even so. His 
will be done, not mine." 

The time of the singing of birds has 
come to such a heart. To such a 
heart spring has come, and summer 
is not far off. 

220. Help, when Needed. — To-day 
I walked in the rooms of my dear 
brother and neighbor Camp, where 
the body of his eldest boy lay await- 
ing burial, and I put myself in the 
father's place. I said to myself, 
" Suppose it were my eldest boy, or 
my youngest, that lay there? " As I 
looked upon the lifeless form, I said 
to myself, " How many things I can 
bear ! but could I bear that ? " Then 
I thought, " Can I turn my eyes up, 
open, frank, clear, cool and consider- 
ate, and say, • Lord Jesus, do as you 
please. Here are the boys— take 
your choice ' ? " Could I do it ? No, 
blessed be God, I could not. The 
time has not come ; till it comes I 
cannot ; but I have no doubt that if 
the time does come God will give me 
grace to do it. 

221. Time for Resignation. — My 
darling child lies sick — my only 
daughter ; and am I, as a minister of 



BEREAVEMENT AND SORROW 



53 



God and an exemplar to men, in sub- 
mission to the will of my Master, to 
say that this sickness is unto death ? 
Because the physician says she will 
not recover, and the nurse says she 
can not recover, and my own fears say 
she may not recover, am I to say " It 
is the will of the Lord she should die ; 
the will of the Lord be done " ? No ! 
I will fight death to the last ; and 
when I have made good battle with 
all the love, and wisdom, and pa- 
tience, and fidelity I possess, and the 



shadow has fallen, and I am defeated, 
then I accept the event ; it is proved 
a true prophet at last ; but I would 
not believe it until 1 had tested it. 
Then I say, " It was the will of tlie 
Lord she should die ; the will of the 
Lord be done." Not when the storm- 
cloud first comes do I accept it as an 
expression of the will of God, but 
when it has done its last work — that 
is the revelation. Facts threatening 
are not revelations ; facts accom- 
plished are. 



VII. BEREAVEMENT AND SORROW 



222. Joy in Grief. — Sorrows are 
like seeds planted for a little while, but 
always breaking up towards the light 
after a short time. They die first, and 
then live again; and every sorrow ought 
to carry in it the germ-form of joy. 

223. Loss of Children. — I have 
sent children on before me. Once, 
wading knee-deep in the snow, I 
buried the earliest. It was March, 
and dreary, and shivering, and awful. 
Then the doctrine that Christ sat in 
an eternal summer of love, and that 
my child was not buried, but had gone 
up to One that loved it better than I, 
was the only comfort I had. If I 
thought that my children, dying, went 
out to wander little pilgrims in dark- 
ness, and that they went wandering, 
they knew not where, in all the realm 
of spirits, I could not be consoled, 
and only stoicism could cover the 
wound which it could not heal ; but 
since I know that God loves my chil- 
dren, that he has said, " Of such is 
the kingdom of heaven," and that he 
wants them to be permitted to come 
to him, though it is with pain and 
sorrow that I yield them up, I am not 
without hope and consolation. 

224. Joy in Affliction. — Some mourn- 
ers that I see at funerals I am deeply 



sorry for. Their rain is turned to ice. 
This chilled grief may be beautiful, as 
in winter ice-clad trees are beautiful, 
when the sun shines upon them ; but 
it is dangerous. Ice breaks many a 
branch ; and so I see a great many 
persons bowed down and crushed by 
their afflictions. But now and then I 
meet with those who sing in affliction. 
Then I thank God for my own sake as 
well as for theirs. There is no such 
sweet singing as a song in the night. 
You recollect the story of the woman 
who, when her only child died, in 
rapture looked up, as with the face of 
an angel, and said, "I give you joy, 
my darling." That singular sentence 
has gone with me years and years, 
down through my life, quickening 
and comforting me. If it had not 
been spoken, or if it had not been re- 
ported, it would have been lost to you 
and to me. 

225. Present Grief, Future Glory. — 
Sorrow and pain and disaster are 
woven in the loom of God ; and in 
the end we, too, shall be permitted to 
discern the fair pattern, and under- 
stand how that which brought tears 
here shall bring righteousness there. 

226. Tears. — " May not I cry, 
then?" Yes, just as the night does. 



54 



NATURAL LIFE 



and in the morning it is dew. Tiicrc 
is not a flower that docs not look 
sweeter for it. True tears make souls 
beautiful. True sorrows are, after all, 
but the seeds out of which come 
fairer joys. 

227. Bearing Afflictions. — Many, 
when they lose their children or 
friends, are made bitter by their be- 
reavements, and say. "Why was I 
robbed ? What have I done that (lod 
should strike me?" They complain 
of God's dealings with them. They 
are vulgar ; they are low ; they are 
insensitive. Afflictions, in the cases 
of such persons, oftentimes leave them 
worse than they find them. But oth- 
ers, instead of being like clay which 
is made harder by fire, are like wax 
that is made softer, and when afflic- 
tions visit them, oh, what wondrous 
truths come out of tears ! what pre- 
cious lessons come out of aching 
hearts ! They learn things that they 
never knew before, and can walk in a 
humble way behind the psalmist, and 
say, " Yea, Lord, it is good for me 
that I have been afflicted." 

228. Relief of Tears in Sorrow. — 
At first, grief was too great. They 
were winter-stricken. The very rigor 
of their sorrow would let nothing flow. 
But as warmth makes even glaciers 
trickle, and opens streams in the ribs 
of frozen mountains, so the heart knows 
the full flow and life of its grief only 
when it begins to melt and pass away. 

229. Enrichment by Trouble. — 
" Man that is born of a woman is of few 
days, and full of trouble." It comes 
to us all : not to make us sad, but to 
make us sober; not to make us sorry, 
but to make us wise ; not to make us 
despondent, but by its darkness to re- 
fresh us, as the night refreshes the 
day ; not to impoverish us, but to en- 
rich us, as the plough enriches the 
field, — to multiply our joy, as the seed 



is multiplied a hundredfold by plant- 
ing. 

230. We Shall Know Hereafter. — 
I shall not forget, while I have con- 
scious being, the look of grief and 
reproach which my little child gave 
me, in his anguish, when he was dy- 
ing. He had always run to me for 
relief, and I had given it ; but now, 
when mortal anguish was on him, why 
did I not help him? What could I 
say ? What could I do, but stand by 
and tremble in agony ? I could not 
tell him that he was not old enough to 
understand ; and if he had been ever 
so old I could not have told him why 
I could not relieve him, and act the 
part of a father. So I think Jesus 
stands by, often, and is absolutely 
unable to let us know why it is that 
he is deahng with us as he is. He 
cannot impart it to us. We are 
not susceptible of receiving instruc- 
tions respecting the great beyond, the 
infinite and eternal, in which he is 
acting, and which is prefigured by the 
part which our hfe is performing, and 
with reference to which the events of 
our earthly career are arranged and 
conducted. All that he can do is to 
say again, as he has said before, 
" What I do ye know not now, but ye 
shall know hereafter." 

231. Departed Children. — Do you 
ever notice the dandelion when it first 
comes up in the spring, and is nothing 
but a mat of little, flat and notched 
leaves lying snugly on the ground? A 
few days of summer sun will bring out 
the plaited bud, nippled in the soil. 
In a few days more it will lift itself 
higher, and open its golden circle. It 
is now born ; and so are our children 
born to us. Wait yet a few days, and 
that blossom is shut up. Its beauty is 
gone. Wait a few days again, and 
out it comes once more. But now it 
is an airy globe, white as pearl, and 



BEREAVEMENT AND SORROW 



55 



exquisite in form as no compass could 
score it. An ethereal globe it is ; the 
wind could blow it away. And such 
are our children who have died ; they 
have gone from us, beautiful to tlie 
last. Through all ages they shall 
live, and bud, and blossom. They 
have been wafted away to the celestial 
sphere. 

232. Joy After Sorrow. — After the 
storm has brooded all day long, and 
hung low, so that the clouds shut out 
all forms, and there was but gray and 
haze, you have often seen the wind 
shift, and roll away the clouds, and 
the clouds bank themselves up and 
sweep out, so that at last the sun, to- 
wards sunset, struck them at the 
proper angle, and all that had been so 
dark and gloomy through the day be- 
gan to light itself up, and stood like a 
heavenly portal glowing wide, and the 
glories began to flash out on those 
banks that now had lifted themselves 
up into the very brightness of heaven. 
And yet it was the same thing that at 
one time made the darkness, and at 
another time seemed to be the glory 
of heaven itself. 

The sorrows and trials and mischiefs 
of this world are dark enough in the 
passing and in the brooding ; but the 
time is coming when the light of God's 
countenance shall be so let in upon 
them that they shall be marvels and 
magnitudes of glory and of beauty. 

233. Suffering, the Test of Love. — 
To-day we are called on for a renewed 
expression of fealty and fidelity. The 
taking of this bread and the drinking 
of this wine is emptiness itself, unless 
we can quicken our faith and our 
thought by some such identification 
with Christ as shall give meaning to 
these materials. Are you broken as a 
loaf is broken ? Is your heart wrung 
as the cluster of grapes is wrung out 
into wine ? Is the very blood, almost. 



of suffering wrung out of you ? Christ 
the Sufferer, Christ the Burden-Bearer, 
Christ — though he first crowned him- 
self least and lowest — is your master ; 
and are you willing to follow him in 
the way of suffering, in the way of 
strife, and make proof of what love is, 
not by the joyousness of a flaming 
love, but by the power of love to bear, 
to endure, to suffer? 

234. " Not Joyous, but Grievous." — 
God IS not like foolish parents, who 
take the spoon of noxious medicine, 
and put it to the lips of the child, and 
say, lying, "Take it, my dear: it is 
sweet and good." God is like an 
honest parent, who says to the child, 
"It is very bitter, my dear ; but you 
must take it, for it will make you feel 
better by and by." So it is of be- 
reavement and of all such sufferings. 

235. Revelations of Grief. — Astron- 
omers have built telescopes which can 
show myriads of stars unseen before ; 
but when a man looks through a tear 
in his own eye, that is a lens which 
reaches to the unknown, and reveals 
orbs which no telescope, however 
skilfully constructed, could do : nay, 
which brings to view even the throne 
of God, and pierces that nebulous dis- 
tance where are those eternal verities 
in which true hfe consists. 

236. Christianity not Stoicism. — 
Some seem to think that a man, to be 
a Christian, ought to be able not to 
suffer when suftering comes ; but the 
ache of suffering is a part of its medi- 
cine. You might as well say that 
manliness requires that a man should 
drink bitter draughts, and not taste 
them, and call them sweet, as to say 
that Christianity requires that a man 
should bear suffering, and say that it 
is not suffering. It requires no such 
thing. It does not even require that 
we should illumine suffering so that 
for the present it shall seem joyous. 



ff' 



NATURAL LIFE 



The Cluislian, when his companion is 
taken from him, is not leqiiired to say, 
" I am so wondertuUy strengthened 
that I have no suffering." A mother 
is not called upon, when she has given 
up her child to God, to say, " I suffer 
none." You have a right to suffer. 

237. What Sorrow Does for Us. — 
A vine planted in a rich soil tends to 
outgrow its fruit. It grows rank, and 
runs and rushes over the trellis. Then 
comes the vintner with his pruning- 
knifc, and cuts it back. He will not 
suffer it to bear leaves alone, but com- 
pels it to bear grapes. And so, when, 
according to the tendency of our na- 
ture, we grow rank, and bear leaves 
in abundance, but no fruit, we are put 
upon a course of discipline, we are cut 
back, and are brought into some sort 
of proportion. We need to be cut 
back, and suffering is the pruning- 
knife that does the work. 

238. Earthly Sadness, Heavenly 
Joy. — All day and all night for two 
long weeks I lay stretched in my 
wretched berth in the steamship, mak- 
ing my hideous, purgatorial passage 
from Europe to America. The berth 
was so short that I could but just 
straighten myself therein, and so nar- 
row that I could but just keep myself 
thereon. The concomitants were all 
after the same scant pattern. And do 
you suppose I ever stretched myself 
out there that I was not reminded, by 
my limitation, of that which I had 
been used to, and which I was seek- 
ing in my own home? Do you sup- 
pose I ever looked through that bull's- 
eye window without thinking of my 
own ample window that overlooks the 
bay ? Do you suppose I ever smelled 
the damp, sticky furniture of the close 
cabin that I did not think of my own 
airy chambers, and the sweet breath 
of heaven in my own halls? There 
was not one discomfort that did not 



suggest a comfort. There was not 
one unpleasant thing that did not sug- 
gest something pleasant. 

And as it is in a voyage upon the 
ocean, so it is in the voyage across the 
sea of life to the heavenly land. Our 
experiences and sufferings are but so 
many hands that point us to the other 
world, saying, " There it shall not be 
as it is here ; for here it is imperfect, 
there perfect ; here sorrowful, there 
joyful ; here weak, there strong ; here 
crumbling, there undccaying ; here 
sinful, there holy ; here exiled, there 
children at home." 

239. Affliction, and its Comfort. — I 
have known a woman who, because 
her children were taken from her, 
went forth to embrace and adopt 
within the wide margin of her heart 
children that had no parents. She 
multiplied her household and filled and 
filled again the places that were left 
vacant in her own cradle. Pouring 
out thus her divinity, she rose towards 
the origin of divinity in man towards 
God. He that afflicts also consoles 
and comforts. Some of the greatest 
works of charity, in the form of hos- 
pitals, of monuments in cemeteries, 
and of mighty colored windows in 
cathedrals, have been testimonies of 
hearts that have been pierced and 
have sought to come out of their sor- 
row by doing something to benefit or 
console other men. The moment men 
begin to feel that affliction is sent to 
make them comforters of others who 
are in affliction, the remedy in them- 
selves has begun, their wound has 
commenced to heal, and their ache 
diminishes. 

240. Sorrows Intermittent. — Our 
troubles are not at all times alike troub- 
lesome to us. Even the sea ceases its 
motion at times, and its surf forgets to 
murmur. Griefs and cares, bitter mem- 
ories, and heavy troubles intermit their 



BEREAVEMENT AND SORROW 



57 



tyranny, to come again with redoubled 
oppressions. Like tides, sorrows seem 
sometimes to flow out and leave the 
sands bare. But again they some- 
times rush in upon us like tides, as if 
they feared that something should 
have snatched from them their lawful 
prey. 

241. " Blessed Are They That 
Mourn." — For perfect beings sorrow is 
not needed ; but to creatures like men, 
seeking to escape the thrall and bur- 
den of animal life, sorrow is helpful. 
As frosts unlock the hard shells of 
seeds and help the germ to get free, so 
trouble develops in men the germs of 
force, patience, and ingenuity, and in 
noble natures " works the peaceable 
fruits of righteousness." A gentle 
schoolmaster it is to those who are 
" exercised thereby." 

242. Praise Lightens Trouble. — You 
will say, " How shall a man praise 
God who seems to himself to be in 
continuous trouble?" Look at the 
history of David, and see how you 
will do it. You will find that in some 
of the Psalms the soul begins in a 
minor key, and by and by rises to the 
major key, and then flies away. If a 
man is in trouble, let him go to God in 
his trouble, till he gets a sense of the 
Divine loving, pitying, sympathetic 
nature, and see if there does not spring 
up in him a spirit of praise. 

243. No choosing of Losses. — There 
is many a man who builds his house as 
the old Egyptians built their pyramids. 
Nothing should shake them — no, 
nothing. But what was in the middle 
of them? Coffins, and the dust of 
royalty. And there is many a man 
whose fine house contains only coffins 
and the dust of departed loved ones. 
Where is that wife ? Where are those 
children ? Where is that brother or 
that sister ? Where is that friend ? 
The man's heart has been desolated ; 



and he says, "If God had taken 
everything else, and left them, I would 
not have called it affliction." That is 
it ; he did not ask you what you would 
rather part with. You had been going 
on, and building up, forgetting that 
there was a point where your career 
came within the bounds of the divine 
government ; and when the finger of 
God was laid upon that which was 
precious to you, you thought that the 
day of judgment had come, such was 
the pain and anguish which you ex- 
perienced. 

244. Meaning of the Sepulcher. — 
Christian brethren, do you know how 
to be glad, and to make others glad, 
in the midst of trouble? Do you 
know how to be peaceful in the midst 
of deepest bereavements ? Do you 
know how to seek Christ in the very 
tomb ? Do you know how to employ 
the tomb as the astronomer employs 
the lens, which in the darkness re- 
veals to him vast depths and infinite 
stretches of created things in the space 
beyond ? Do you know how to look 
through the grave and see what there 
is on the other side — the glory and 
power of God ? Blessed are they to 
whom Christ hath revealed the mean- 
ing of the sepulcher. 

245. Softening the Heart by Trouble. 
— They used to engrave, you know, 
on copper-plates ; but these wore out 
so quick that there had to be some- 
thing invented to take their place. So 
Perkins, our countryman, introduced 
the practice of engraving on steel 
plates. But steel was so hard that it 
was with great difficulty that pictures 
could be cut upon it. The conse- 
quence was, that the plates were 
softened by a chemical process, and 
while they were in that stnte, the pic- 
ture was cut upon them ; and then 
they were put into a furnace and har- 
dened. So when God wants beautiful 



5« 



NATURAL LIKE 



pictures, lie softens a man with trouble, 
and etches all over him ; and when 
his nature has received and solidified 
tiie pictures as of his own substance, 
he is in a condition to print from. 
This process, which is so beneficial in 
its results, is one of the most disagree- 
able blessings that ever come to us, 

246. Assassination of Lincoln. — 
Never did two such orbs of experience 
meet in one hemisphere, as the joy and 
the sorrow of the same week in this 
land. The joy of final victory was as 
sudden as if no man had expected it, 
and as entrancing as if it had fallen a 
sphere from heaven. It rose up over 
sobriety, and swept business from its 
moorings, and ran down through the 
land in irresistible course. Men em- 
braced each other in brotherhood that 
were strangers in the flesh. They 
sang, or prayed, or, deeper yet, many 
could only think thanksgiving and 
weep gladness. In one hour, under 
the blow of a single bereavement, joy 
lay without a pulse, without a gleam, 
or breath. A sorrow came that swept 
through the land as huge storms sweep 
through the forest and field, rolling 
thunder along the sky, disheveling the 
flowers, daunting every singer in 
thicket or forest, and pouring black- 
ness and darkness across the land and 
upon the mountains. Did ever so 
many hearts, in so brief a time, touch 
two such boundless feelings? It was 
the uttermost of joy ; it was the utter- 
most of sorrow ; — noon and midnight 
without a space between ! 

247. Sorrow a Revealer. — In so 
great a congregation as this, where 
there are so many thousands that by 
invisible threads are connected with 
this vital teaching-point, sorrow be- 
comes almost a literature, and grief 
almost a lore, and we are in danger 
of walking over the road of consola- 
tion so frequently that at last it be- 



comes to us a road hard and dusty. 
We arc accustomed to take certain 
phrases, as men take medicinal herbs, 
and apply them to bruised, and 
wounded, and suffering hearts, until 
we come to have a kind of ritualistic 
formality. It is good, therefore, that 
every one of us, now and then, should 
be brought back to the reality of the 
living truth of the Gospel by some 
hcartquake — by some sorrow — by 
some suffering. 

248. Effect of Sorrow. — Sorrows 
work upon the soul as late rains do 
upon vegetation. All night a cold 
rain falls, and in the morning the 
leaves are gone. The coverts are no 
longer shady, trees hold up bare 
branches, and the air with every pufif 
of wind is filled with leaves, languidly 
descending to the ground. After the 
first shock and excitement of grief, 
which sometimes carries the soul high 
up towards serene experiences, comes 
the reaction. The nerve of pleasure 
is paralyzed. All objects report them- 
selves to the senses in somber colors. 
Values are changed or destroyed. 
Life is empty and effort useless. In 
thoughtful natures next arise anxious 
questionings. The breaking up of the 
heart seems, for a time, to overturn 
the conclusions of the reason itself. 
Men doubt their most settled beliefs, 
and bold skepticisms invade the secret 
calm of Faith. While the nobler 
sentiments are silent and torpid, there 
spring up in their place sudden repul- 
sions and capricious disgusts. 

The valley and shadow of Death is 
not dreadful to those who pass through 
it, but to those who follow after but 
may not pass through ! 

249. Persistence in Sorrow. — There 
are those who think it is wrong to let 
their sorrows die out. If they find 
that their pain is becoming alleviated, 
they blow the embers again, and rake 



BEREAVEMENT AND SORROW 



59 



out the coals from the ashes that 
threaten to hide it. They are almost 
alarmed at themselves when now and 
then some old joy breaks out. They 
seem to feel that there is a sacred 
duty of sorrow, and that midnight 
ought to be their symbol and signal. 

250. Limited Value of Sorrow. — 
The ascetic doctrine of Christianity, 
while it did a certain good work in a 
certain poor way, as a type of uni- 
versal Christianity was a wretched 
thing. 

Sorrow is very much like the acids 
which men use to make etchings with. 
They take a plate, and, covering it 
with a wax film, mark the lines of the 
picture with a little scratcher through 
to the copper, and they pour acid on, 
and then leave it just long enough for 
it to eat in a little bit, and wash it off" ; 
but if they let the acid stand all day 
and all night it makes a great black 
blur, and no picture. In the spirit 
life God etches pictures on us by bit- 
ing sorrows, here and there ; but if 
we think, " It was sorrow that did me 
good, it was because I was made sor- 
rowful that I was blessed, and if a 
man would be a Christian he must be 
steeped in sorrow," that is letting the 
picture stand in acid all day and all 
night, and there will be no picture. 

251. Recalling Griefs. — Never re- 
member the past to renew your grief, 
but only to renew your courage. 
There be many persons that sit 
on their grief as miserable fowls sit 
upon eggs that are spent ; and the 
longer they sit the worse they are. 
When a grief has had its way, let it 
go ; make no rest for it ; warm it with 
no feathers ; abandon it. Sufficient 
unto the day is the grief and the 
trouble thereof; and certainly do not 
cosset your griefs, nor pity yourself. 

252. Sorrow not Typical of Chris- 
tjaijjt^, — Sorrow and suffering may be 



made instruments of reformation — 
nay, of manhood, but, on the other 
hand, sorrow is not the type of Chris- 
tianity. When a man is sick by dis- 
turbance or interior arrangements, he 
loathes food, his head swims, fever 
beats in every vein, and he takes 
nauseous medicine, a good deal of it 
usually. Yet nobody wants to have 
medicine about his table as a dish, as 
if it were the best thing a man could 
eat every day. It is good relative to 
recovery from a worse state, but not 
to set forth a type. In the ministra- 
tion of God's providence in this world, 
tears and heartbreak, and all forms of 
moral or social suffering are good for 
what they do to a man who is sick or 
out of the way, but when he is brought 
by suffering into some affinity with tlie 
right way, not suffering is the type of 
the right way, but joy, peace, hope. 

253. Benumbing Effect of Suffering. 
— Sometimes there are illusory effects 
of trouble. There is an element of 
exhaustion, and there is a reactionary 
element, by which those in suffering 
are wrongly judged. Frequently, 
when persons seem to have grown 
harder, they are not harder. They 
have merely lost the power of much 
feeling. A person is not necessarily 
hard because he does not feel. His 
want of feeling is often nothing but 
nature insisting upon suffering no 
more till it has had an opportunity to 
recuperate itself. I have known per- 
sons who, after great trouble, could 
not read the Bible, and did not wish 
to pray, or go to an assembly of God's 
people. Singing was discord in their 
ear. And so it was with them some- 
times for weeks and months. But it 
was simply nature attempting to re- 
store their wasted energies. There 
was no moral character in it. 

254- Joy in Trouble. — There is a 
joy that rises higher than any suffer- 



6o 



NATURAL LIFE 



ing ; there is a happiness that can 
have an undertone of sorrow and an 
uppertone of ecstasy ; and wliile there 
is a great variety of enjoyments — the 
scale is long — no man has touched 
the ecstasy of happiness who has not 
been able to find it while under great 
sorrows and crushing griefs. No man 
ever made wine until he had crushed 
the cluster, and the heart-wine never 
is expressed till after the affections 
have been crushed. 

255. Between Sorrow and Gladness. 
— It overwhelms me to baptize chil- 
dren bearing the names of my own 
children that are in heaven, although 
many years have rolled between their 
going and my present thought and 
feeling. When the bereavement was 
fresh upon me, I was as one that stood 
half-way in darkness and half-way in 
the light. With my upper nature I 
felt, "The Lord gave, and the Lord 
hath taken away: blessed be the name 
of the Lord ; " I loved God, and 
thanked him and blessed his name ; 
there was nothing that I could not say 
easily and sincerely in his praise ; but 
I dropped out of that feeling every 
moment. It was as though I were 
beating hither and thither like a pen- 
dulum. I vibrated between sorrow 
and gladness. In thinking the matter 
over I came to this consciousness : 
" Heartache is good for you." There- 
fore I said, " Ache, heart, and take it 
out in aching." I did not try to stop 
grieving. I let the tears run down my 
cheeks as freely as they would. Wak- 
ing in the night, I had, I was going to 
say, my sorrow as a luxury. When 
1 saw other people's children, and 
thought of my own, and anguish took 
hold of me, I said, " It is good for you 
to suffer. Christ sits as a refiner, and 
is trying the gold ; and when it is 
enough refined he will cease trying 
it." 



255. Comfort in Trouble. — It is re- 
corded of the wife of one of our gen- 
erals in the West — General Wallace, 
who fell at the battle of Pittsburg 
Landing — that, hearing that he was 
wounded, she went forth to seek him, 
and that not until she reached that 
dismal and disastrous place, and found 
his body, did she learn that he was 
dead. After the body was placed 
upon the steamboat, and the descent 
of the river had begun, she gave way 
to inconsolable grief, from which she 
was aroused by the groans of the 
wounded that were on board. Little 
by little she forgot her own sorrows, 
and devoted herself to ministering to 
those poor men in their distress. From 
that moment during the whole of the 
Iiospital voyage she overcame her bit- 
ter grief. How? By prayer? By 
withdrawing herself to her own cabin ? 
She did it by binding up the wounds 
of the suffering ; by bearing the cup 
to fevered lips ; by wiping the brow 
that was covered with the sweat of 
death ; by pouring consolation into 
the ears of young men who longed for 
father and mother to whom to utter 
their last words. She comforted others, 
and forgot her own trouble. And yet 
she was a widow — and that is a word 
that compasses a world of unreveala- 
ble trouble, 

257. Mourning for Death. — The very 
slender hold which Christ has taken 
of our life is nowhere else shown so 
much as in the wantonness of our 
grief and surprise at the death of our 
beloved ones. Why should they not 
die ? Were they given to us that we 
might sequester them ? Does no one 
else love our children but ourselves? 
Are we to employ our love as chains 
and bonds, that we may bind them 
forever to the earth ? I have never 
seen any man hanging crape upon 
trees because the blossoms had fallen, 



BEREAVEMENT AND SORROW 



61 



tliat the fruit might swell ; but I see 
people putting crape upon their doors, 
and upon their own persons, because 
summer had come sooner to their chil- 
dren and their companions than they 
thought. 

258. Bearing of Trouble. — True pa- 
tience always sees, or believes in, some 
benefit to arise from bearing trouble. 
In other words, it is a moral exchange, 
suffering being the price that one pays 
for a greater good to be enjoyed by 
and by. The coin which we give for 
higher elevation is iron, and hard to 
circulate ; but the product is golden. 
The endurance of suffering is that 
which turns everything it touches into 
gold. It is the philosopher's stone 
that transmutes to a higher form all 
that is low and groveling in us. 

259. Meaning of Sorrow. — You do 
not know what is going on, you do 
not know all the meaning of your sor- 
row ; God does. Do you suppose that 
the wool on the sheep's back knows 
what it is coming to when it is sheared ? 
When it was scoured and washed and 
spun, and twisted of its life almost ; 
when it went into the hateful bath of 
color; when it was put into the shuttle, 
and was thrust back and forth, back 
and forth, in the darkness, and out 
came the royal robe, it did not know 
what it started for ; yet that is what it 
comes to — kings wear it. 

260. Lost Cares Precious. — Ah ! 
our cares, even, are dear to us, 
though we may not know it when we 
are in the midst of them. I remember 
me when, with impatient voice, I com- 
manded the children to cease the 
racket of their sport. Could I not be 
permitted to read ? Must my house 
be as a bedlam ? — I would to God that 
I had children to cry there now. I 
wish there would something make a 
noise there now. Was your little babe 
so troublesome that you sometimes 



wondered that God should make it 
fretful all night, so that you must 
needs rise every hour to nurse it and 
to care for it? and did you begin the 
cant of the nurse, and talk about your 
weariness and great pain in taking 
care of the child ? Peradventure God 
heard you ; for he took it to himself. 
He never begrudges the care of any- 
thing. And then, when you saw the 
child's little shoe, and its little things 
that were put away in the drawer, 
how, in the anguish of your soul, you 
said, " Oh ! if it were a thousand times 
as much pain and care to me, would to 
God that I might have it back again ! '" 

261. Suffering, a Ripener. — Dr. 
Spurzheim used to say that no woman 
was fit to be a wife and mother till she 
had been educated in suffering. I say 
that no man or woman is fit for the 
highest offices of friendship and of life 
until he or she has had a full experience 
of suffering. I do not say that there are 
not admirable people who never have 
suffered ; but I say that they would be 
more admirable, good as they are, if 
they had suffered more. I do say that 
suffering is necessary to turn the acids 
of life into sugar — to make the saps 
sweet. I do say that suffering should 
be to human dispositions what the 
early frosts of autumn are to the al- 
most ripened leaves, which turn them 
into gorgeous colors, and fill the whole 
sky with the tokens of coming death 
and glorious beauty. 

262. The Lost Baby Kept. — When 
the young mother sheds the first glow- 
ing leaf in autumn, and the babe is 
carried from her arms and buried, and 
she, like some fragrant bush in the 
morning covered with dew, shakes 
tears from every twig, because I, too, 
do not measure every one of her sighs, 
and every one of her sobs, do 1 not 
sympathize with her? For I say to 
myself, "What is this loss but the 



I 



62 



NATURAL LIFE 



making of a greater nature in yon ? " 
She buries the babe to keep it. So 
only do we keep our children, as 
children, when we put them away 
from us in infancy, and see them no 
more until we meet them in heaven. 
They remain shrined in the imagina- 
tion, little children forever. 

263. Chastening — Now and After- 
ward. — " No chastening for the pres- 
ent seemeth to be joyous," not only, 
but none « joyous. It is grievous. 

"Nevertheless—!" That "never- 
theless" always seemed to me like a 
golden door thrown open to a man 
who stood in a dreary, stained 
passage, and disclosed to him a gor- 
geous parlor full of all brightness and 
beauty. " Nevertheless, afterward it 
yieldeth the peaceable fruit of right- 
eousness unto them that are exercised 
thereby." 

264. Exercised by Sorrow. — It is 
said that sorrow worketh. Look at 
some of those exquisite and extraordi- 
narily rare workings in iron at old 
Nuremberg (one of the most charm- 
ing, I think, of the cities of Europe), in 
the cathedral. Do you suppose the 
iron was just pinched out into shape ? 
How many strokes did it receive ? 
How many hittings did it undergo on 
the anvil ? How was it beaten here 
and there ? How was it bent forward, 
and backward, and forward, and back- 
ward again ? How was it distorted 
and contorted? How w^as it worked 
and worked till by and by it was cov- 
ered with little specules as multitu- 
dinous as those in frost-pictures, and 
more delicate and more permanent ? 
They were wrought out by incessant 
workings in the fire, and on the anvil, 
under the hammer. Suffering makes 
a man, or spoils him. A good many 
are spoiled in the making. 

265. Dear Ones Gone. — 1 go, in the 
autumn, and sow my seeds through 



my garden — for many of them nnist bo 
autumn-sown ; and when the spring 
comes, and I visit my grounds again, 
I shall find not what I sowed. 

I threw the brown-black seeds into 
the dirt ; there stands the glowing spike 
all a-blossom. I sowed to the flesh : I 
shall reap of the spirit. I gave dust 
to dust. God wrapped in his arms my 
child. He tended my dear ones. He 
loved into sweeter beauty my friends. 
They are nobler than when I elected 
them. And in the heavenly land they 
wait. What? How looking? In 
what occupations ? We know not pre- 
cisely ; but this we know, generally : 
that faith, hope, love, and all that can 
be evolved out of them in human ex- 
perience, are forever unchanged, ex- 
cept to grow brighter and Ijrighter. 

266. Rejoicing Amid Sorrow. — As 
in storms, sometimes there are mo- 
ments when the clouds part and let 
through the whole gusii of the sun, 
and change in a moment the terror to 
sublime beauty ; so out of anguish, 
often, the soul rises to a vision of that 
which sorrow does for men, and of 
what is its real interior and after na- 
ture. In these high moods we look 
back upon sorrows as if they had been 
no sorrows. 

267. Cleansing Power of Great 
Troubles. — In the sultry insect-breed- 
ing days of summer, how insects 
abound ! Every tree is a harbor for 
stinging pests. Wherever you sit, 
they swarm around and annoy you, 
and destroy your peace and comfort. 
By and by there come those vast 
floods of clouds that bring tornadoes, 
and that are thunder-voiced ; and 
up through tlie valleys, and over the 
hills and mountains, sweep drenching 
and cleansing rains. And when the 
storm has ceased, and the clouds are 
gone, and you sit under the dripping 
tree, not a fly, not a gnat, not a pesti- 



OLD AGE 



63 



lent insect is to be seen. Tlie winds 
and rains have driven them all away. 
Has it never been so with those ten 
thousand little pests of pride, and van- 
ity, and envying, and jealousy, and 
unlawful desire, that for days have 
teased and fretted you, and kept 
you in conflict with conscience, and 
affection, and all the higher faculties, 
until God sent upon you some great 
searching sorrow, some overwhelming 
trouble ? And in those hours he gra- 
ciously sustained you, and lifted you 
up towards himself, so that, although 
you suffered unutterable affliction, you 
felt that it had cleansed you from jeal- 
ousies, envies, vanity, pride, the 
whole swarm of venomous and sting- 
ing insects that had beset you. 

268. Maturing JJnder Sorrow, — 
There are many fruits that never turn 
sweet until the frost has lain upon 
them ; there are many nuts that never 
fall from the bough of the tree of life 
till the frost has opened and ripened 
them : and there are many elements 
of life that never grow sweet and 
beautiful till sorrow touches them. 

269. The Sorrow of Humanity. — 
The whole creation has been travail- 
ing and groaning in pain until now. 
There is a great deal of joy yet, there 
is a great deal of success yet ; but the 
wail can always be heard if one has an 
ear to hear, and will listen to the un- 
dertone of sorrow. I remember going 
down on Long Island a few years ago, 
and reaching, about sundown, a place 
where I was to speak. Stepping up to 
the door, I heard the whole heaven 
murmur with a deep, wonderful sound. 



I was thirty miles from the ocean ; 
but my host said, "That is the sea 
breaking on the shore ; we have just 
had a storm." As the storm sub- 
sided, still there was that everlasting 
moan. Night and day the ocean is 
not still. And so it seems to me, 
often, that it is with human life itself. 
There is an underlying moan and bass 
to all the melodies of hfe. 

270. Bereavement, Expansion of 
Life. — There is many and many a 
man who never knew that there were 
more than twenty-five thousand miles 
in the universe until love sent him a 
mourning pilgrim seeking after the 
absent one. Then he learned that 
there was an infinity. For, when a 
soul stricken through and through, 
goes mourning, and saying, " Where 
is it ? where is it? '" and the sun says, 
" Not in me," and night says, *' Not 
in me," and the grave mutely says, 
" Not in me," and God says, " Here," 
and the Spirit and Bride say, " Come," 
— oh ! then the heart learns circum- 
navigation and largeness, and has re- 
stored to it in the long run, in the 
augmented sense of love, and in the 
power of augmented moral being, 
more than has been taken from it. 
Absence is for a day, but knowledge 
is for eternity. 

271. The Baptism of Suffering. — 
O, the cleansing of suffering ! God 
grant that we may have the cleansing, 
and not the baptism alone ! 

272. The Night of Sorrow. — Afflic- 
tion, like the blackness of night, is in- 
dispensable to the outshining of the 
stars. 



Fill. OLD AGE 



273. Blessedness of Age. — When 
the burdens of life press us down, and 
seem to crush us into the very earth, 
we hear Thee say. Come unto me, all 



ye that labor and are heavy laden, 
and I will give you rest. And the 
very thought of Thy willingness and 
of thy power brings refreshing rest, 



64 



NATURAL LIFE 



as we wilt under the fierce sun all the 
day through ; but as the evening 
draws near, and cool breezes come 
from the sea, as we toil in the midst 
of the fierce attritions of life, its rival- 
ries and fiery temptations, and our 
years are consumed, and we draw 
near to the end of them, there set off 
from the other land, far beyond our 
sight, those sweet influences in which 
is all the strength of God ; and out of 
which Thou hast made manifest what 
Thou art. 

274. Weakness and Joy of Old Age. 
— I have seen the eagle in his own 
sphere. How strangely does it stir a 
man's soul to see one of those birds 
of light lying afloat, as it were, in the 
upper ocean, slowly swinging, as if 
but his thought kept him there, and 
not his wing-beat. And I have seen 
that same bird tied and caged, caring 
not to plume his feathers, and his 
wings all drooping. How utterly un- 
like that bird of God in the heavens is 
this miserable bird of man in the 
cage ! 

It is pretty much that way with men 
that have been in the thunder of 
youth, and in the power and freshness 
of manhood, and that at last go drag- 
gled and drooping and all disheveled 
into a piping, pining, complaining, 
suffering, helpless, and hopeless old 
age. Is that the eagle ? That is the 
eagle! Is it not piteous? "Oh! to 
die early," you say. No, no! there 
is a better view than that. Does 
earthly joy sound far distant, like the 
very memory of a dream to you ? 
Listen, then, to those sounds that 
come wafting over from the other 
land — joys that are undimmed forever 
at the right hand of God. 

275. Perfectibility. — There are no 
perfect persons in this world until 
very late in life — if then ! In early 
life men are like fires of snapping 



wood, burning in imperfect chimneys, 
puffing out a good deal of smoke, 
oftentimes throwing coals of impa- 
tience clear out into the room. And 
when at last the fire has burned out 
and gone to ashes or red coals, and 
the danger is gone, comfort comes. 
There are persons almost intolerable 
in early life that, after age comes, and 
quietness, become very beautiful and 
very charming. And the other way, 
there are many persons that are like 
sweet wine when young, but the fer- 
mentation is not checked and they 
turn out vinegar. We frequently 
spoil what we have, and then mourn 
to think we have it not. 

276. A Good Life. — A noble life, 
begun early and completed wisely, 
looks to me like a fair building which 
taste erects. The left hand is taste, 
and the right hand wealth. Although 
when the house is being built men do 
not see exactly what is meant, be- 
holding dirt thrown out, the materials 
scattered around, and the workmen's 
chips and shavings, the mortar and 
the lime surrounding and the scaffold 
hiding it, yet, when the building is 
completed, the scaffolding taken down, 
the soil and dirt removed, and the 
household are moved in, and the 
lights burn in the windows, and there 
is music in every room, and love con- 
secrates every hall and passage, how 
beautiful then is that accomplished 
building ! Such is the life of a good 
man. 

277. Late Maturity in Life. — The 
aster has not wasted spring and sum- 
mer because it has not blossomed. It 
has been all the time preparing for 
what is to follow, and in autumn it is 
the glory of the field, and only the 
frost lays it low. So there are many 
people who must live forty or fifty 
years, and have the crude sap of 
their natural dispositions changed and 



OLD AGE 



65 



sweetened before the blossoming time 
can come : but their hfe has not been 
wasted ; it has been growing. 

278. Work, to the End of Life. — 
On the first of January let every 
man gird himself once more, with his 
face to the front, and take interest in 
tlie things that are and are to be, and 
not in the things that were and are 
past. Be in sympathy with the time. 
Concern yourself with all that is going 
on. Some persons talk about a man 
having passed through a stormy life, 
and sitting now at the end of his life 
in quiet, preparing himself for heaven. 
Heaven does not want any such 
preparation as that. That is the best 
preparation which a man makes when 
he is using the whole force of his 
being in his day and time. I love 
those streams that run full, clear to the 
ocean. Some men there are who are 
like mountain streams, torrent-fed, 
that boom in the spring, with won- 
drous glory of fullness and power, and 
go rushing through the earlier months, 
but slacken their speed, and by mid- 
summer are only a trickling reminis- 
cence of the river. I like to think of 
streams like the old Merrimac, that 
begin work up near their head-waters, 
and never run a league without turn- 
ing some mighty wheel of industry, 
and have no vacation to the end, but 
go into the sea with the very foam on 
their surface. 

279. Weakness of Old Age. — How 
beautiful is a tree full and round with 
wide-spreading branches ! How beau- 
tiful are those evergreens that stand, 
to-day, in New England, immortal em- 
blems of the old Puritan manhood and 
love of liberty, and that are green the 
year round without variableness or 
shadow of turning, so far as their 
color is concerned, but whose form 
changes with every winter. They 
cannot long preserve their present 



symmetry. For now, soon, there will 
come those ice storms, and the over- 
loaded branches will be unable to hold 
up the weight of snow and ice that 
settles down upon them; and, stiff 
with cold, one will crack, and there 
will be a gap on one side of the tree ; 
and another will crack, and there will 
be a gap on another side of the tree. 

Where is the man that has come to 
manhood who cannot bear witness 
that his branches have been broken, 
sometimes on this side, sometimes on 
that ; sometimes in his property and 
sometimes in his reputation ; some- 
times in his loves and sometimes in 
his friendships ? There are few that 
have advanced anywhere near to old 
age who can say that the storms of 
life have not remorselessly wrestled 
with him, and borne down his boughs. 
And some men stand all through the 
latest part of their earthly existence 
like ragged and disheveled trees 
on the mountainside, winter-beaten, 
winter-bruised and winter-cracked. 

Now is such a career worth having, 
if this is all of human experience ? If 
it were all, I should almost feel the 
latent contempt which the apostle im- 
plies. 

280 . Obscuration of Faculties. — After 
a life of eighty-seven years, my dear 
and venerable father entered, last night 
at 5 o'clock, into his rest. He has lived 
far beyond the average life of man, 
and lived the whole of his life as 
simply virtuous, as nobly Christian, as 
heroically active as any man, I think, 
of whom we have had any account in 
history. 

For a year and a half his mind has 
been greatly impaired, and at times 
entirely obscured. As men, prepared 
for a voyage, pack up their things, 
and, being detained, dwell in un- 
furnished apartments, desolate — so he 
sat, his rarest and noblest faculties 



66 



NATURAL LIFE 



scilod iij). It w,»s, thcrctorc, a con- 
trast all the brighter and sweeter when 
these faculties, unused for so long a 
time, opened again in the transcendent 
glory of the heavenly state. His 
future life is in heaven : his earthly life 
is in the churches. 

About two years ago, recovering 
from a sickness, he called to those 
about him to read him t/uxt passage. 
After reading numberless ones — for he 
could not indicate which it was — after 
long tryings by one and another, they 
fell, in God's good providence, upon 
this : 

" I am now ready to be offered, 
and the time of my departure is at 
hand. I have fought a good fight ; I 
have finished my course : I have kept 
the faith ; henceforth there is laid up 
for me a crown of righteousness, which 
the Lord, the righteous judge, shall 
give me at that day." 

And then they went on to read, 
" and not to me only " when he inter- 
posed, in his energetic way : " I have 
nothing to do with the rest — tliat is 
mine — that is my testimony — write it 
down — that is my testimony ! " 

That was his last substantial testi- 
mony ; and I think he was as worthy to 
make it as the one who first uttered it. 

281. Right Standards. — An old 
man, who began enthusiastically with 
high moral sentiments and purposes, 
whom life has hewn and maimed and 
diminished and soured like a worn out 
fruit-tree, and made censorious and 
deprived of all impulse for virtue, for 
beauty and for disinterestedness ; the 
man who began with all the sentiments 
of youth bright and glowing, but has 
vulgarized himself and stands in his 
old age indifferent, morally, gravitat- 
ing and gravitating down — there is not 
under the broad heaven another sight 
or scene more pitiful than that, ex- 
cept it be a young man, without im- 



pulse, in tlic spring antl freshness of 
life, with no sprouting, and no aspi- 
ration, and no romance, without out- 
burst, without generosity. If he be- 
gins so, how will he end ? Our stand- 
ards of life should begin right, and they 
should grow more and more as we 
come up to them. 

282. Hope of Heaven, in Old Age. 
— How desolate must old age be to 
the man who has no heaven beyond ; 
who stands trembling with infirmities, 
declined in ear, and eye, and tongue ; 
his hand palsied, his memory gone — 
looking back across the dreary stretch 
of life that he has just passed over, 
and forward with fear to the life of 
which he thought so little ! How 
glorious for an old man to stand, as 
Moses stood, upon the top of the 
mount, looking across the Jordan into 
the promised land, and viewing the 
fair possessions that awaited him ! 
Moses died, and did not go over ; but 
the old man shall die, and go over, 
and shall find it in that day a land 
rich, beautiful, and glorious. 

283. Approach of Age.^ — Old age 
comes as autumn and winter come. 
Then the trees grow thin and bald at the 
top, as men do, and one by one, all 
things retreat to the root ; the fields 
become bare ; the hillsides take on a 
russet color ; all nature strips herself. 
As one casts aside his raiment for 
sleep, so all things betoken the ad- 
vance of autumn and the coming of 
winter. We know these things in re- 
spect to the year and the things be- 
neath us ; we do not recognize them 
as true in respect to ourselves. But 
they are as true of us as of the year. 

284. Beautiful Age. — I have seen 
the aged linger, so round, and rich, 
and bright, and beautiful, as to make 
youth seem poor in treasure when 
compared with old age. It is a great 
thing so to have lived that the best 



DEATH 



67 



part of life shall be its evening. Oc- 
tober, the ripest month of the year, 
and the richest in colors, is a type of 
what old age should be. 

285. Complete Life. — Old age is a 
part of the scheme of life, which was 
designed to be beautiful from begin- 
ning to end. It is the close of a sym- 
phony, beautiful in its inception, roll- 
ing on grandly, and terminating in a 
climax of sublimity. It is harmonious 
and admirable, according to the 
scheme of nature. The charms of in- 
fancy, the hopes of the spring of 
youth, the vigor of manhood, and the 
serenity and tranquillity, the wisdom 
and peace of old age — all these to- 
gether constitute the true human life, 
with its beginning, middle, and end — 
a glorious epoch. 

286. Approach of Death. — Autum- 
nal days are the most beautiful days 
of the year, and they ought to be the 
most beautiful days in a man's life. 
In October things do not grow any 
more, they ripen, they fulfill the destiny 
of the summer, and the thought of 
autumn is that it is going down, going 
forth. When all things in nature 
know and feel that death is coming 
near, do they sheet themselves in 
black as pagan Christians do? Do 
they turn everything to hideous 
mourning as pagan Christians do ? 
They cry : " Bring forth our royal 
garments," and the oak puts on the 
habiliments of beauty, and all the 
herbs of the field turn to scarlet and 



yellow and every color that is most 
precious ; and the whole month of 
autumn goes tramping towards death, 
glowing and glorious. It is only men 
tiiat make death hateful and gloomy 
and black. 

287. A Lovely Old Age. — Have you 
never, in a summer morning, seen the 
sun come nimbly up only to make 
battle with the clouds ? It is obscured 
when it first rises ; but by ten o'clock 
it is seen again. By eleven o'clock it 
is obscured once more. Through all 
the forenoon it is stormy and cloudy 
by turns. All the afternoon there are 
dense vaporous clouds which shroud 
the sun's glory. And yet, as he 
draws near to the horizon the clouds 
lift, and with full-orbed majesty he 
descends into the open space, and 
looks back across the whole earth ; 
and he is never so radiant as just be- 
fore he sets. Having triumphed over 
the day, having come out victorious 
over the storm, he goes down in won- 
drous beauty. 

So have I seen men and women go 
through sorrows and conflicts, through 
storms and suffering, during their 
mortal life, with here and there an ex- 
perience of joy, till they came to their 
last years, when God said to them, 
"Stand a little while, my child, and 
shine ; " and they stood, luminous, to 
teach men how real is the transforma- 
tion of the soul, by love, into the like- 
ness of God ; and how beautiful was 
holiness as exemplified by them ! 



IX. DEATH 



288. Death, a Grade. — When a man 
emerges through the gate of death into 
the other land he is not perfect. No 
miracle is wrought on him. He goes 
from the school to the university. 

289. Uncertainty and Certainty of 
Death There is not far from youth 



that hidden certainty of death. I am 
speaking to some that I shall never 
speak to again. You are marked. 
You are going away, and my eye 
shall never rest on you again. There 
are some of you now within a hand- 
breadth of the grave, and yet it doth 



68 



NATURAL LIFE 



not appear wliu it is. It I were to say 
that some sharp-shooter, hidden, 
would launch the fated bullet into the 
midst of this assembly, with what ter- 
ror would the whole of you rise ! and 
yet Death stands with bow drawn 
back to the uttermost, and that arrow 
is just on the string that will speed 
to some of you. You seem strong 
to-day. To-morrow you shall be 
weak. 

290. Wholesome Thinking About 
Death. — Some of you will die soon, 
and some of you will live to be forty 
or fifty years old ; but you do not 
know which will go nor which will 
remain ; and it is good for us all, once 
in a while, to stop and listen to the 
beat of the surf on the shores of 
eternity. It is well once in a while to 
cleanse ourselves of the fascinations 
and allurements of this world by bath- 
ing in the still and solemn waters of 
imagined death. Oh, what coolness 
it will give to the fever of men ! Oh, 
what a check and restraint it will be to 
heated passions! Oh, what modera- 
tion it will impart to over-excited im- 
aginations and desires ! 

291. Near to Death. — Suppose word 
should come to us to-day, " Put thine 
house in order," what would we do 
with our house ? What changes would 
we make? There are some men's 
houses that are like newly-built dwell- 
ings, all of whose chimneys smoke. 
There are their unsubdued passions, 
their selfishness, the creations of their 
pride, their unreasonable demands, 
their unregulated dispositions, and one 
thing, I think, would open the windows 
and let all the smoke out — " Put thy 
house in order, for this day thou shalt 
die." 

292. Appearing Before God. — If, to- 
day, there sliould come flying hither a 
messenger wlio should say, "One 
hundred members of this congrega- 



tion, now assembled, are to die this 
year," no matter whether any desig- 
nation of persons was made, no matter 
in what month, or in what part of the 
year it should take place, every man 
would say, " It may be I." There 
are some of you that will unquestion- 
ably go before the end of the year. 
No man can tell who. . . . To 
learn suddenly, when we are engaged 
in a sultry summer day, that some 
great and honored personage is, with- 
out warning, about to come to our 
dwelling — what haste ! what change 
of garments ! what hurried prepara- 
tion of the household ! But when it 
is no man, however honored, but God, 
into whose presence we are soon to go, 
how natural that we should look at the 
habiliments of the soul, and at every- 
thing within us and without us, as we 
never would at any other time — as 
perhaps we never could at any other 
time ! What new measures and tests 
should we apply to ourselves ! 

293. Forethinkings About Death. — 
It is not desirable that we should live 
as in the constant atmosphere and 
presence of death ; that would unfit 
us for life ; but it is well for us, now 
and then, to talk with death as friend 
talketh with friend, and to anticipate 
the experiences of that land to which it 
will lead us. These forethinkings are 
meant, not to make us discontented 
with life, but to bring us back with 
more strength, and a nobler purpose 
in living. 

294. Refreshment in Thought of 
Eternity. — You are, after a long, 
weary summer's day, suffocated with 
heat, grimed with dust, covered with 
perspiration, and fretted of skin. You 
are permitted to go down to the shore 
of the ocean, and bathe in its trans- 
lucent waters ; your body is cleansed, 
and cooled, and reinvigorated ; and 
you return along the shadow of the 



DEATH 



69 



evening, grateful, and sliongci" than 
you went. 

God's ocean of eternity is so near 
that the soul moiled with trouble may 
cast itself in, and bathe its troubles 
away, and return to its life again, 
bright, clear, inspired, strong. 

295. The Hope in Death. — I am 
not sorry when my corn is cut down 
in autumn. It is one of the most 
beautiful of crops. There is no more 
pleasing sight in the world, I think, 
than a field of Indian maize. Yet, 
when it begins to wither, to shrink up, 
and the wind makes harsh whistlings 
through it, I do not feel bad. Why ? 
Because the ear is there, and it is 
ripe, and I have my grain. And if I 
want to, I can plant it again the next 
spring, and have another harvest the 
next autumn. 

And when a man is all withered and 
shrunk, and dies out of the refuse 
heap of life, if I am sure that the corn 
is in him, and that in the other life it 
will be planted again, and will spring 
up, and grow and ripen, then there is 
no occasion for me to feel bad. 

296. The Natural Death. — A true 
man should keep time like a clock, that 
goes on through a whole twenty-four 
hours, and until the very last beat : 
and when at last the weight touches 
the floor, there is no explosion ; there 
is no disruption ; the pointers are 
there ; the dial still shows its fair face ; 
every wheel is still in its place ; the 
clock has simply run down, and si- 
lently, quietly, it stops. All the fair 
framework is left just as it was. Such 
should death in old age be — only that 
the s-oul ceases to keep time here, that 
it may begin to keep time where there 
is no running down, and where eternity 
shall be marked by hours of joy and 
minutes of pleasure forever and ever. 

297. The Act of Dying. — Dying is 
hke the folding of the flower. It is a 



gentle wind dropping away. It is a 
tide flowing out to the depths beyond. 
It is a taper going out. It is a spark 
extinguished. It is a silent bird at 
twilight shooting through the sky, half 
rosy-lit, to its nest. 

298. Beauty of Death. — To me, the 
gate to the grave is the pearly gate. 
Death, to me, is no slamming door of 
darkness, behind which sprites gibber, 
to frighten men. I abhor a death that 
looks black. I abhor all the monu- 
ments which represent grief as a child 
of midnight nursed by sorrows that 
the night breeds. Dying is translation. 

299. The Ease of Dying. — I look 
forward more and more, of course, 
every year, to dying. Death is no 
longer a disagreeable topic to me. 
On the contrary, life is not half so at- 
tractive as it once was. I suppose I 
know just how an apple-stem feels 
when the apple is ripe and ready to 
fall. It feels all the time that the 
apple is letting go. And I feel many 
fibers of my stem letting go. Some- 
times I have been almost superstitious 
in the thought that the emotions I 
have experienced in this regard were 
foretokens and indications of ap- 
proaching dissolution. If it be so, 
blessed be God. It is better to depart 
and be with Christ, than to live even 
here and with you. I cannot conceive 
any ministerial life to be more happy 
or to be more eminently favored than 
mine has been and is. If there is an- 
other place that can be better than 
such a one as mine, surely it must be 
heaven, where Christ dwells in all his 
glory. 

300. Repose of Death. — You can- 
not find in the New Testament any of 
those hateful representations of dying 
which men have invented, by which 
death is portrayed as a ghastly skeleton 
with a scythe, or something equally 
revolting. The figures by which death 



70 



NATURAL LIFE 



is rcprebciitocl in tlie New Testament 
iiro very diffeieiil. One of them, 
whicli 1 lliinlc to l^e exquisitely beauti- 
ful, is tliat oi faltini^ aslicp in Jesus. 

301. The Peace of Dying. — When a 
little child has played all day long, and 
become tired out, and the twilight has 
sent it in weariness back to its mother's 
Icnee, where it thinks it has come for 
more excitement, almost in the midst 
of its frolicking, and not knowing 
what influence is creeping over it, it 
falls back in the mother's arms, and 
nestles close to the sweetest and soft- 
est couch that ever cheek pressed, 
and, with long breath, sleeps ; and she 
smiles and is glad, and sits humming 
unheard joy over its head. So we fall 
asleep in Jesus. We have played long 
enough at the games of life, and, at 
last, we feel the approach of death. 
We are tired out, and we lay our head 
back in the arms of Christ, and quietly 
fall asleep. 

302. Jewish Vievir of Death. — In 
reading the Old Testament we are im- 
pressed with the mournfulness which 
was felt, in the early times to which it 
refers, with regard to the death of all 
except such as were gloriously slain in 
battle, or such as were old, and went 
out like a burnt-out wick. There was 
then no illumination of the act of 
dying. Men did not die with the 
rising sun ; they died, as it were, with 
the setting sun, when darkness rolled 
towards midnight. 

303. Glory of Death. — Is not dying 
as much a part of God's mercy as 
being born? When the apple-tree 
blossoms you laugh, and you do not 
cry when you pick the apple ; but 
when man blossoms man laughs, and 
then, when God picks the fruit, he 
cries. Fool, that understands so lit- 
tle ! Wiicn will you recognize that 
whicl\ constitutes your highest good ? 
Glorious is the hour when God says, 



" Come up hither ; " and yet you look 
upon that hour with fear and dread. 

304. Solitariness of Death. — Moses 
on Nebo stood alone; and who, dying, 
does not stand alone .'' That is the 
one act in which there can be no com- 
panionship. Though a million are 
around about us, the moment comes, 
in passing away, when we are as soli- 
tary as if we dwelt in the great desert 
of Sahara, or in the very midst of the 
ocean itself; and if Moses had given 
up his breath to God surrounded by 
myriads of his people he would have 
been as much alone as when he stood 
upon the summit of Mount Nebo on 
the top of Pisgah, to deliver up his soul. 

305. A Hope for the Death-hour. — 
As birds in the hour of transmigration 
feel the impulse of southern lands, and 
gladly spread their wings for the realm 
of light and bloom, so may we, in the 
death-hour, feel the sweet solicitations 
of the life beyond, and joyfully soar 
from the chill and shadow of earth to 
fold our wings and sing in the summer 
of an eternal heaven ! 

306. The River of Death. — When 
engineers would bridge a stream, they 
often carry over at first but a single 
cord. With that, next, they stretch a 
wire across. Then strand is added to 
strand until a foundation is laid for 
planks ; and now the bold engineer 
finds safe footway, and walks from 
side to side. So God takes from us 
some golden-threaded pleasure, and 
stretches it hence into heaven. Then 
he takes a child, and then a friend. 
Thus he bridges death, and teaches 
the thoughts of the most timid to find 
their way hither and thither between 
the shores. 

307. Preparation for Death. — As in 
autumn the very earth prepares for 
death, as if it were its bridal, and all 
the sober colors of the summer take 
higher hues, and trees and shrubs and 



DEATH 



71 



vines go forth to their rest, wearing 
their most gorgeous apparel, as end- 
ing their career more brightly than 
they began it ; so let our spirits cast 
off somber thoughts, and sable mel- 
ancholy, and clothe themselves with 
all the radiancy of faith ; with every 
hue of heavenly joy. " Blessed are 
the dead that die in the Lord." 

308. Death Not an Exile. — Having 
lived much in the West, I have seen 
many emigrants arrive there, who, on 
account of poverty or misfortune, or 
from the hope of bettering their al- 
ready comfortable circumstances, were 
in search of homes in-that region. I 
have seen them piled out on the thor- 
oughfares when the weather was 
bleak, and where they were strangers 
among strangers ; and I have thought 
that their reception must seem to them 
rather a cold one. And if dying was 
to be thrust out of life, and to emi- 
grate to a land where we had no 
friends, where there were none that 
knew us, and where we knew nobody, 
it would be a sad thing indeed. But 
if our names are known in heaven ; if 
tliey are written in the Lamb's book 
of life ; and if Jesus Christ has ever 
been our Head, our Leader, our Me- 
diator, administering in our behalf, and 
preparing a place for us, that where he 
is we may be also, then heaven will be 
familiar to us, and dying will not be so 
much to be deplored after all. 

309. Death is Life. — O ! lift up your 
eyes and look beyond. If you are 
afraid of death, dismiss from you the 
fear. Silence all these echoes of pa- 
ganism. Let death have its own ap- 
propriate colors. As the sun goes 
down it banks the heavens around 
about it with most radiant colors, and 
the sun going down here, is rising al- 
ways somewhere else, for sunset is 
sunrise. When we look upon death, 
do not let us disfigure it by speaking 



gloomily of the tomb. I am not 
going into it, God forbid ! You cannot 
get nic under ground. What you will 
put lliere is not I. When I leave the 
cars that bring me from Boston hither, 
I do not leave myself behind ; I leave 
the vehicle that brought me here. I 
belong to the body by the earth life, 
but by the ministrations of society and 
the subtle, invisible spirit of God that 
hovers everywhere as the sunlight, 
there has been developed in me some- 
thing higher and nobler. I belong 
above. 

310. Death, Going Home. — By such 
glorious images as these God is pleased 
to represent our departure from the 
present life. The Lord Jesus Christ 
shall come to our poor old weather- 
stained school-house in this world, and 
say to us, "Vacation time! Come 
home ; you are wanted there ! " 

311. Living and Dying. — To live, 
is to try to be a man ; to die, is to be- 
come one. To live, is to be in the 
twilight ; to die, is to find the morning 
breaking into noon. To live, is to be 
in the ore ; to die, is to be stamped with 
the image and superscription of God. 

312. Transplanting of Death. — Long 
before winter would let me plant out 
of doors, I planted under glass, and 
depended upon artificial heat, and 
waited for the time when I might re- 
move my early plants ; as soon as I 
dared I set them in the open air, in 
some sheltered nook where the frosts 
should not touch them ; but now in 
these June days, I have taken them 
into the broad, exposed garden, and 
put them where they are to stand and 
blossom ; and they did not weep when 
I put them there. God has raised us 
under glass, and nurtured us here, 
that we might bear transplanting to 
another and better sphere. 

313. Sudden Death. — When one is 
ready to depart suddenness of death is 



72 



NATURAL LIFE 



a blessing. It is a i)aiiiful sight to sec 
A tree overthrown by a tornado, 
wrenched from its foundations, and 
broken down hke a weed ; but it is yet 
more painful to see a vast and venera- 
ble tree lingering with vain strife 
against decay, which age and infirmity 



have marked for destruction. The 
process Ijy which strength wastes, and 
the mind is obscured, and the taber- 
nacle is taken down, is humiliating 
and painful ; and it is good and grand 
when a man departs to his rest from 
out of the midst of his labors. 



X. IMMORTALirr AND HEAVEN 



314. The Background of Life. — 
When a man look his son to Joshua 
Reynolds, or some other English 
painter, to have him learn the art of 
painting, he said that he hoped the 
boy might be of some assistance to the 
painter by painting his backgrounds 
for him. The painter replied, " Any- 
body who can paint my backgrounds 
for me needs no instruction from me ; 
for the background is the foundation 
of the whole picture." Now, eternity 
is the background on which every- 
thing beautiful or right is to be painted, 
even if we desire to have it in the full- 
ness of its earthly fruitfulness. 

315. Love Teaches Immortality. — 
We can imagine without violent shock 
the decadence and sleep of every fac- 
ulty but love. If a man does not be- 
lieve in immortality, let him apply his 
doctrine to reason, and he says, 
" Stars go down, and why not the 
reason ? It may go down into dark- 
ness, or it may rise somewhere else in 
another personality." All the facul- 
ties of the soul might come up in order, 
and one after another might be im- 
agined to be consigned to the sleep 
that all shall find if there be no life 
hereafter. But no man ever loved his 
mother, and consigned her with any 
tolerance to an everlasting sleep. No 
man ever loved his wife, and buried 
her, saying, with any composure, 
"There is no immortality for her." 
No man over bore his child to the 
grave, though it were one that he 



could carry in the palm of his hand, 
that everything in his nature did not 
rise up, and say, " Let me find it 
again!" No man ever proudly loved 
a heroic father, and consented that 
that father should go to extinction. 
The flame of love, once shining, no 
one can endure to believe will ever go 
out. Love, therefore, teaches the 
soul to long for, and to believe in, a 
better land. 

316. Worth in the Other World. — 
No man can afford to invest his being 
in anything lower than faith, hope, 
love — these three, the greatest of 
which is love. If you invest in every- 
thing else, presently it is bankruptcy, 
though it may not be in this hour. 
Woe be to that man who freights his 
ship, and sends her across the sea to a 
distant port, to find out that his wares 
are not marketable ; that they lie a 
dead loss on his hands. Woe be to 
that man who freights himself, and 
comes at last into the port above, to 
find that all that he is, and all that he 
has, is worthless in that sphere. 

317. Earth-Judgments in Heaven. — 
God will never receive us upon any 
invoice sent from this world. Every 
man is to be unpacked, examined, re- 
appraised, mostly thrown away ; and 
that which is least esteemed here is to 
be measured most and judged most, 
and the reverse ; so that the last shall 
be first, and the first shall be last. 
The ton thousand who go without a 
procession to the grave, whom no man 



IMMORTALITY AND HEAVEN 



73 



knows to have died and no man 
misses, may have their procession on 
the other side, and armies in triumph 
shout them home ; while men who are 
followed to the grave by a long pro- 
cession, who are buried with much 
state, and who fill the world for a time 
with the sound of their fall, may be re- 
ceived on the other side silently and 
without procession. And happy is it 
for them if they do not rise to shame 
and everlasting contempt. 

318, Perils of the Future. — A man 
wants to go from Scio, in Greece, back 
to New York. His heart aches to see 
his father, his mother, his family, his 
wife, or his sweetheart. Here, bound 
right to the port of New York is a 
swift ship, with a good commander, 
and all on board healthy, who urge 
him to go with them. "Well," he 
says, " I must go, but I am going 
round by the way of Constantinople ; 
and then by the Italian coast." " But 
they have got the plague there!" 
" Yes," he says, " but I have reason- 
able assurance that though I may be 
stopped in Constantinople by the 
plague I shall get over it. When I 
get on, and go round into the Italian 
cities as far as Venice, very likely I 
shall be taken down again with chills 
and fever, and shall lie by there with 
mortal pains, for, it may be, a year ; 
but in the course of five years I hope 
to get back to New York." In just 
such a way there are a great many 
men who, when I say, "There may 
be a probation after death," say, 
" Well, then, I shall get to heaven 
finally, shan't I?" Yes, you may, 
through purgatory ; but why do not 
you take ship and go straight there ? 
Why endure suffering ? Fools! to treat 
your souls so ! Fools beyond all other 
fools that live upon the face of the 
earth. You would not treat your 
bodies so. You would not treat your 



merchandise so. You would not treat 
a brute beast as you treat your soul in 
such matters as these. 

319. Heaven-Sickness. — The child 
at school at the beginning of the term 
zealously prepares his little bow and 
arrows, his traps and springs, his 
riddles and puzzles, and what not. 
Then they are choice treasures to him, 
and he mourns if anything befalls 
them ; but when the last days of the 
term come, how generous he is in dis- 
tributing them! He tosses them to 
one and another of his companions, 
saying, " Here, you may have them if 
you care for them : I do not want 
them any more." He is glad to get 
rid of them. The things that a month 
or two ago he guarded sedulously in 
his treasure-chamber now have no 
value to him ; for the hunger of home 
is on him. What homesickness is to 
the child away at school, that to the 
soul is heaven-sickness, which sets us 
free from the ten thousand joys and 
sorrows of this world, if we really are 
heaven-sick. 

320. Immortality Enlarges Hori- 
zons. — A man without a belief in the 
future is like a man who does not 
breathe more than half an inch in his 
lungs ; he is short of breath, as it were, 
like a man with the consumption : but 
the moment he believes in endless ex- 
istence he is like a man who breathes 
freely and fully. A man who has no 
belief in immortality is like a man in a 
prison ; but a man who believes that 
ere long the stroke of death which 
shatters him will shatter the material 
elements by which he is confined in 
this life, and make his horizon bound- 
less — how large a manhood there is in 
him ! What a refuge to him is the 
thought of the everlasting ! 

321. Visions of the Invisible.- — We 
thank Thee both for those things which 
are making the stature of our life, and 



74 



NATURAL LIFE 



for tliosc evanescent experiences which 
come as the morning breaks on the 
night witli overwhehning hght. For 
those joys that come upon us as far-off 
music that wakes our slumbers, for 
that conscious nearness to the invisible 
which at times almost brings sight it- 
self, and for the victories of later years, 
as well as for the hope of yet greater 
revelations of life in immortality, how 
can we enough thank Thee ! We are 
sons of God ; it doth not yet appear 
what we shall be. 

322. Intimations of Heavenly Joys. 
— All the things we would know of 
heaven are hidden from us, because 
we are not yet able to understand 
them. Not that Thou dost not reveal 
them ; but the revealing falls upon us 
as the sunlight on the stone that hath 
in it no seed and no life. 

Yet we thank Thee that at times 
there come glimmerings ; and, as they 
that in the twilight summer evenings 
hear afar off the dying swell of music, 
and yet may not know whence it 
comes, nor what makes it, nor what is 
the theme, so there come to us, wait- 
ing and watching, wafted notes ; and 
we love to believe that they belong to 
the great symphony that chants forever 
more above our heads, 

323. Earthly Preparation for Heaven. 
— When men in earlier days went 
westward (and my boyhood remem- 
bers the flow of emigration to Ohio— 
the long train of white covered wagons, 
the teams long strung out, the multi- 
tudinous articles of household ware) — 
if a man went with nothing, walking 
all the way, he could scarcely expect 
when he reached his destination to 
have very much to begin on. Every 
man that was at all prosperous, thought, 
" Let me take enough to set up my 
house, and to begin my life in the 
distant land, with some degree of com- 
fort and prosperity." It is wise in an 



emigrant. Now, every noble trait, 
every noble habit, every heavenly dis- 
position which you can attain in this 
life, you are carrying across the wil- 
derness, and into the new settlements 
above ; and the man who is there with 
much to begin with will be more glo- 
riously happy than he who goes in there 
so as by fire, escaped, but with noth- 
ing in his hands, 

324. Conceptions of Heaven. — 
Bring me, if you please, one of Titian's 
most magnificent pictures— the Mar- 
tyrdom, or the Assumption, or any of 
those masterpieces on which his fame 
stands. I look at it, and say to my 
companion, " What is that? " "That," 
he says, " is the Virgin." " What is 
that deepest and most glowing of 
reds? " "That is her gorgeous robe." 
"What is that exquisite blue farther 
up, on her shoulders ? " " That is her 
scarf." "What is that green that I 
see behind her?" "That is a tree, 
with leaves on it." " What is it that 
I see through the tree?" "That is 
the sky." No, it is not. I go up to the 
picture and scrape it, and that red is 
nothing but pigment ; and that blue is 
nothing but a little metal and oil. 
There is no robe and no scarf there at 
all. I scrape off one of the leaves, 
and there is no juice in it. It is metal 
and oil, and that is all. And that sky 
— you can pinch it, and scratch it, and 
crumble it in your hand. It is all dirt 
— nothing but dirt. And yet, out of 
these base substances, by the cunning 
hand and imagination of the artist, is 
wrought a picture such that, when you 
look upon it, you never will think of 
what it is made up of — you will not see 
the pigment, nor the metal, nor tlie 
oil. These things, to the looker-on, 
are garment, are face, are flesh. They 
seem to be a living being clothed in 
beautiful garments, though in reality 
they are but dead matter. 



IMMORTALITY AND HEAVEN 



75 



All the world is a vast pallet, and 
all liunian experiences are so many 
pigments, and the method of teaching 
which God pursues, in the New Testa- 
ment, is that he, as the sublime Artist, 
takes this pallet of universal experience 
and draws in gorgeous colors the lines 
and lineaments of the heavenly state. 
The things which he uses are all 
earthly, and are not to be reproduced 
in heaven, though the things which 
they represent to us are heavenly. 
The materials out of which our con- 
ceptions spring are earthly experi- 
ences ; but the effect of the concep- 
tions, when combined with the Spirit 
of God upon the imagination of man, 
is to reveal to him, and bring him into 
sympathy with, the invisible and 
spiritual life, as it could be done by 
no philosophical process. He who 
knows aught of heaven, therefore, 
knows it altogether through the ex- 
perience and interpretation of his im- 
agination. 

325. " Abundant Entrance " into 
Heaven. — St. Peter, speaking of men 
who are pursuing all the Christian vir- 
tues, says that if these things abound 
in them, an exceeding abundant en- 
trance shall be ministered unto them 
of God's glory ; and by that latent fig- 
ure (for there is a latent figure ex- 
pressed in the Greek, which is not 
shown in our translation), it is de- 
clared that men who do a great work 
in this world, when they come up to the 
gate of heaven, will have a conqueror's 
reception. When the warrior returned 
from illustrious victory, when the mon- 
arch returned from some provincial 
subduing, and drew near to the city, 
all the bands went out, and the whole 
body of citizens went crowding forth 
to meet him, far along the road, to 
give him the most illustrious reception, 
with sounds of music. So, says St. 
Peter, men who are rich in the great 



Christian virtues, when they go back 
to heaven, shall have a triumphal, a 
conqueror's entrance. 

326. The Heavenly Welcome. — 
Lord, we are traveling home. Let not 
the watchman sleep at the gate when 
we come to knock. Give us an ex- 
ceeding and abundant entrance into 
the kingdom of thy glory. 

327. A Prophecy of Future Life. — 
We are perpetually receiving seeds in 
our temperate zone, from foreign zones : 
seeds from South America, and seeds 
from the Orient. They have great 
promise in them ; some of fruit, some 
of esculent vegetable, and some of 
blossom : and the torment of our sum- 
mer to those who are enthusiastic in 
regard to such things, is that it is not 
warm enough nor long enough to 
bring forth their excellence. The 
flower will not blossom ; the fruit will 
not develop its saccharine nature. 
Men plant these seeds, and nourish 
them till they begin to develop all the 
habits of their respective species, and 
throw out buds which give promise of 
fruit, and excite confident expectation. 
Witii great care the gardener protects 
the plant from the first frosts, hoping 
thereby to enable it to come to ma- 
turity. But at last winter smites it be- 
fore it has even blossomed, and he 
cannot but say, "The growth of this 
plant was not completed ; it was sus- 
ceptible of further development ; but 
I could not carry it any further because 
the season was not long enough nor 
warm enough." And all the reason- 
ing in this world could not convince 
him that God created that plant to 
stop growing where it did. He says, 
that it stands to reason that this 
partly developed plant was meant 
somewhere to have a summer long 
enough for its full development. 
Human life in this world is a seed 
whose development here stops far 



76 



NATURAL LIFE 



short of those possibihties which are 
foreshadowed in its experiences. 

328. Growth in Earth and Heaven. 
— There will be another climate, 
another soil, and a nobler growth ; but 
there will ht growth. That which you 
have not learned here, you must learn 
there. 

In Labrador, the missionary, at the 
beginning of a short summer, sows the 
seed of the vine. It comes up, and 
gets a little start, and is taken out of 
the soil and husbanded during the 
winter, to be put out again when the 
next brief summer sets in. But in the 
course of the ten years of this mission- 
ary's life in that cold region, the vine 
does not get more than three or four 
feet high, and never shows any symp- 
tom of bud, or blossom, or cluster. 
The soil is too cold, and the summer 
is too short. At length, the mission- 
ary is recalled to his native land, and 
he takes this vine, the pet of his leis- 
ure, and brings it down into our south- 
ern latitudes, and plants it. It is now 
the same vine ; it has the same root ; 
but it is not the same sky that is over 
it. Look long, O Summer ! Look 
warm, O Sun ! Search and find where 
the hidden things in the vine are. Be- 
hold, how it begins to shoot up ! See 
what a stately growth it is having ! 
Look at the branch upon branch 
which it is throwing out ! Observe 
the smell in the air ! See the blos- 
soms, and after the blossoms, the 
clusters which the autumn shall see 
hanging impurpled and ripened ! But 
it took another soil and another sun to 
produce it. It never would have 
reached that state in Labrador. 

329. Happiness of the Immortal. — 
We hail and bless the good fortune 
that hath been vouchsafed to our loved 
ones who have departed. While the 
world walks with heavy tread, they 
move with a light step ; and though 



our hearts are sometimes sad, they re- 
joice as the angels of God. 

330. " Not Unclothed, but Clothed 
Upon." — Are we marching only to the 
grave, and have we no consolation ex- 
cept that of the Thanatopsis of Bryant — 
that we go not as slaves driven, but as 
those that lie down to sleep ? I mar- 
vel how one could have written only 
that, stopping just short of the mag- 
nificent thought of the Apostle — " Not 
that we would be unclothed, but 
clothed upon." As if men had been 
beggars here and had worn tattered 
garments which still they were willing 
to wear, if need be ; but beholding the 
other robes — the celestial apparel — 
they longed for it, and made haste to 
be unclothed ; disrobing, not for sleep, 
but for glory ! 

331. A Resurrection Type. — Have 
you ever watched the dandelion as it 
lay with golden blossom snugged in 
the grass of the meadow? If you 
pluck one, how coarse the stem is ! If 
you examine the blossom, the crowded 
congregation of golden petals, it is not 
beauteous, it is coarse, though the 
effect is at a distance bright and beau- 
tiful. But when it has perfected itself 
as a blossom, and all its petals are 
shed, and the seed begins then to 
spring up, how in one ripening hour 
do you see the fairest, the most airy 
and evanescent globe of seed, follow- 
ing the blossom, that you can find in 
the whole vegetable kingdom ! I 
never see a dandelion that 1 do not 
think, "There you are, man, living in 
the world ;" and I never afterwards 
see that airy and exquisite globe of seed 
that I do not think, " There you are 
resurrected." That is the man when 
he is here on earth, and this is the man 
when he is perfected. How, in a mo- 
ment, is he translated from the coarse, 
low form of the blossom, into this airy, 
almost spiritual beauty of the seed ! 



IMMORTALITY AND HEAVEN 



77 



332. Heaven in the Heart. — You 
might put a blind man in the Louvre 
of Paris, and he might walk among 
the acres and prairies of pictures there, 
and not be conscious that he had seen 
the stroke of one artist-hand. You 
might bring a deaf man within the 
sound of all the bands of heaven and 
of earth, and there would be no music 
to his consciousness. And if a man 
is not prepared to enjoy the felicities 
of heaven, those felicities will be noth- 
ing to him. Heaven is not heaven 
except to those who have the initiation 
of it in themselves. They carry it in 
their own heart first. 

333. Eternity to Show Earthly 
Work Many of you seem to your- 
selves to have done little on earth. 
You do not know what you have done. 
God writes you a check, and seals it 
up, and gives it to you to carry to the 
bank, and you will not know how 
much it is till you are paid, and then 
you will be surprised. You do not 
know what you have done in your 
own family, or to the poor, or for those 
that live next door to you. You may 
teach your servant to read the word 
of Hfe, and he directs his attention to 
the salvation of his poor heathen fel- 
lows, and through him many are saved, 
and in the other world how your work 
will open up ! 

334. Future Joy a Present Help. — 
It was a whole lifetime that we lived 
in those four years of the Civil War — 
yea, a hundred lifetimes. A man 
might Hve twenty centuries, and not 
in all of them have as much experi- 
ence as was crowded into those dark 
four years. And yet, when the tidings 
of victory came, all the past was as 
nothing ; and ever since, the thunder 
of cannon, the clash of swords and 
the groans of the wounded have been 
dying out and receding further and 
further, till they have well nigh gone. 



Wounds that could not well be healed 
have become less and less sensitive, 
and our whole land is steadily coming 
together, and being knit together, in 
spite of hindrances, and in spite of the 
many things that would better not 
have been ; and before ten years have 
rolled around the great flame of war 
which has passed over us will have 
been well nigh forgotten. So, only 
let me know that after the conflicts of 
every kind in this life — all jarrings, all 
disputes, all superstitions, all cruelties, 
all idolatries, all unfaiths or unbeliefs, 
all crimes, all vices — only let me know 
that after these, I shall stand and look 
back upon time, and shout, " Thou art 
worthy. Lord God Almighty, because 
thy judgments are just and true, and 
all nations shall be gathered under 
thee," and I am content. The dark- 
ness shall be but as a troubled night. 
The day comes, and where is the 
night ? where are its dreams ? 

335. Disclosures of the Future. — 
Have you never seen how when they 
were finishing the interior of buildings 
they kept the scaffolding up? The 
old Pope, when he had Michael 
Angelo employed in decorating the 
interior of that magnificent structure, 
the Sistine Chapel, demanded that the 
scaffolding should be taken down so 
that he could see the glowing colors 
that with matchless skill were being 
laid on. Patiently and assiduously 
did that noble artist labor, toiling by 
day, and almost by night, bringing 
out his prophets and sibyls, and pic- 
tures wondrous for their beauty and 
significance, until the work was done. 
The day before it was done, if you 
had gone into that chapel and looked 
up, what would you have seen ? Posts, 
planks, ropes, Ume, mortar, slop, dirt. 
But when all was finished the work- 
men came, and the scaffolding was 
removed. And then, although the 



78 



NATURAL LIFE 



floor was yet covered with rubbish 
and litter, when you looked up it was 
as if heaven itself had been opened, 
and you looked into the courts of God 
and angels. 

Now, the scaffolding is kept around 
men long after the fresco is com- 
menced to be painted; and wondrous 
disclosures will be made when God 
shall take down this scaffolding body, 
and reveal what you have done. 

336. The World not Our Home. — 
It is only when a man considers this 
world as a schoolhouse, and not a 
dwelling, that it will serve the purpose 
it was intended to serve. The academy 
is not a place to live in. We go into 
it that in due time we may come out 
prepared for a higher sphere. 

337. Contentment v^rith Mortality 
Unnatural. — It does not make any dif- 
ference to an apple-blossom whether 
there is an apple behind it or not; but 
it does make a difference to a man 
whether he is anything after this life or 
not. It does not make any difference 
to the insects, to the ephemera of crea- 
tion, whether they perish or not— there 
is too little of them ; but for a man 
who is full of sublime qualities, whose 
sphere in this life has already become 
sovereign by the attainments which he 
has achieved, whose thoughts soar 
above the earthly realm, whose emo- 
tions belong to another sphere, whose 
conceptions are of a volume, a vast- 
ness, a grandeur and a dignity which 
take hold on things spiritual and 
heavenly — for him to look upon him- 
self in this incomplete state and say, 
" I am willing to go back to dust," is 
unnatural. 

338. Annihilation, Unnatural Idea. 
— Harriet Martineau said that she 
could conceive, with perfect tranquil- 
lity and even with a species of enjoy- 
ment, that she might go out, and have 
no longer individual memory or iden- 



tity, existing simply as material to be 
reconstructed in the form of other 
beings ; but I think that by this very 
expression she put herself apart from 
her kind. I cannot conceive of any- 
thing more colorless, anything that 
touches the mind so little, in so few 
places, and yet so painfully, as the be- 
lief that when we have wound up our 
short existence here that is the end. 

339. The Earthly and the Heavenly. 
— We behold how the precious seed is 
sown in this life, and how it is har- 
vested, and taken to the granary 
above ; but what it shall be when it is 
sown again under fairer skies, and in 
a better clime, we know not. This 
we know, that we are sons of God. 

340. Joy in Helpful Work. — If he 
that gives a cup of cold water to a lit- 
tle child in the name of Christ shall 
not fail of his reward, how much less 
he that opens springs in the desert, 
that strikes the rocks in the mountains 
so that they gush forth, that digs wells 
from which men through generations 
can drink. Do the little that you can ; 
do more if you can ; and when at last 
you return with joy upon your head 
to enter in at the gate, there shall 
throng forth from it so many that you 
cannot count them of those who were 
refreshed in the hours of sorrow and 
weariness of the way by your labor, 
and they shall come with rosy hand 
and joyful lip to greet you and to 
bring you before the throne of the 
Saviour. 

341. A Thought of Future Life. — 
While man is living in this life sub- 
ject to all its ailments and down-puU- 
ings and hindrances of every kind, 
who can conceive what he will be 
when his spirit wings its way upward, 
and leaves these encumbrances behind 
which have had so much to do with 
sinning in this life? The body, and 
all that belongs to it, will sleep in the 



IMMORTALITY AND HEAVEN 



79 



grave, and the spirit will go forth in 
might and symmetry, and will indeed 
be a " new creature." 

Consider, too, the social element. 
Consider what a power there is in it 
of development. How much music 
inspires music ! How easy it is for 
the current to go where single drops 
could not move ! Men tend, I think, 
in all great periods of development, to 
go forward by a certain enthusiastic 
movement of the whole. Now, trans- 
fer that quality to spirits whose ele- 
mentary faculties have been developed 
and perfected, who are cut loose from 
the hindrances of the body, and who 
are translated to another sphere where 
all of society is alike — where there is a 
common intelligence, a common moral 
sentiment, and a common social life ; 
where there are none to molest or 
make afraid ; where none sin and 
none attempt to sin ; where the whole 
public sentiment in which the soul 
lives and moves is one of rectitude, 
and purity, and love, and aspiration, 
and glorifying worship. 

342. Hunger for Continuance. — 
There are mute, inexplicable feelings 
connected with the mere extension of 
time which belong to the higher de- 
velopment of manhood in us. Fran- 
gible things are of less value than 
things that are infrangible. Things 
that last are of more value, on the 
same plane, than their congeners are 
that do not last. 

Who can equal the pictures which 
are painted on the panes of glass in 
our winter rooms ? Where can you 
find a Lambineau, or any painter who 
can give mountain scenery such as we 
have for nothing, every winter morn- 
ing, when we wake up, and such as 
the sun outside, or the stove inside, 
destroys before ten o'clock? These 
pictures are not valued as are those 
which are painted on canvas, and 



which are not half so good ; but the 
element of enduring is with the latter, 
while the element of evanescence is 
with the former. Though the pictures 
on the pane are finer than those on 
the canvas, they lack the element of 
time, on which value so largely de- 
pends. The soul craves, hungers for, 
this quality of continuance as an 
element for measuring the value of 
things. 

343. Life Without Immortality. — 
We are building a crystal character 
with much pain and self-denial ; and 
is it to be built as bubbles are blown? 
What is finer in line than the bubble ? 
What is more airy ? Where are pic- 
tures more exquisite, where are colors 
more tender and rich and beautiful — 
and where is there anything that is 
born so near to its end as a bubble ? 
Is the character which we are building 
with so much pain and suffering and 
patience, with so much burden of con- 
science, and with so much aspiration ; 
is the character which we are forming 
in the invisible realm of the soul — is 
that but a bubble ? Is that only a 
thin film which reflects the transient 
experiences of a life of joy or sadness, 
and goes out? Then, what is life 
worth ? The finer men are the better 
they are, if they are forever : but the 
finer men are the worse they are, if 
they are only for a day ; for they have 
a disproportion of sensibility to suffer- 
ing over and above present remuner- 
ation and conscious enjoyment. 

344. Mortal and Immortal Vision. — 
At midnight, undertake to examine a 
landscape with a candle, carrying it 
around to each particular thing, and try 
thus to get an idea of the whole scene. 
That is the way we are exploring in 
this life. But let a thunder-storm 
come up, and a flash of lightning open 
the whole country — hill, valley, cliff, 
every part — to instantaneous view ; 



8o 



NATURAL LIFE 



and we see it instantly. That is the 
way we shall think, in the other life. 

345. What we Shall Be. — Consider 
the force of human reason, by which the 
whole physical universe is being now 
unbarred ; by which the most distant 
orbs are being searched, weighed, 
analyzed ; by which we are unwrap- 
ping the sun, and taking off coat after 
coat ; by which we know more about 
the sun itself than oftentimes men do 
of the province in which they live on 
earth. What an education ! What 
an outstretch of thought ! What de- 
velopment of the reasoning, searching 
power of the mind ! Who could have 
suspected it in the days of barbarism ? 
No man could then have told that. 
And who now can foretell what new 
development the human reason is 
capable of .-' As from the lower stages 
you could not suspect the higher, so 
from the present stages you cannot 
anticipate those which are yet to come. 
Now we think ; but in the higher 
forms of thinking there is the intuition, 
the jump, as it were, the flash of 
thought, with which our present think- 
ing is not to be compared. We call it 
intuition, we call it inspiratioti, we call 
it names ; but names are not things. 
There is evidently the hint of a 
wondrous disclosure of power in the 
direction of reason " in the ages to 
come." We do not see it here. We 
cannot know it. We can only know 
what is the perpetual suggestion of it. 

•' We are the sons of God ; but it doth not 
yet appear what we shall be." 

346. The Soul's Anchor. — Here is 
the anchor: The hope of immortality 
through Jesus Christ, which is "as an 
anchor to the soul, sure and steadfast, 
and which enters into that within the 
veil "—into the very holy of holies. 

With this central and controlling 
power established, any soul may safely 



swing in any circuits it pleases, within 
due measure. Once let a man's soul 
get anchored upon God, and he may 
swing round in wide circuits of 
speculation and doubt, and he will 
not be materially hurt. He has an 
anchor that brings him up in due time. 
But a man that has no faith, a man 
that is without God, a man that is 
destitute of an anchor, and that drifts 
a wanderer in God's universe — woe 
be to him ! How helpless is a man 
that has no faith in himself, and not 
much trust in men, and no definite 
belief, and no God, and no hope ! 

347. The Hereafter. — What eagle 
ever went sorrowing after its shell when 
once it was born ? While it is an egg, 
the shell is its protection, and in the 
walls of that little globe it has its 
safety ; but when once it has broken 
the shell, and come out, and become 
an eagle of the heaven, it never goes 
sorrowing back to the nest again, 
though when it was but an eaglet, and 
unfledged, it hugged it so. 

In all your thoughts of this life, 
where God has nested us, and where 
we are fed and developed, remember 
that the things which are now dear to 
you, while they are things good and 
desirable, are many of them transient ; 
but that part of your nature which 
sorrow is meant to develop, that part 
which love is ripening, that part out 
of which comes the truest joy, that 
part which leads to all that is sublime 
in character, and is transcendent 
and divine, and allies you to God — 
remember that this grows apace, and 
waits in those that have gone before. 
How beautiful it will be when we shall 
find, not what we have lost, but that 
which has been saved and nurtured 
for us ! 

348. Earthly Conditions Forgotten 
in Heaven. — When freshets sometimes 
surprise villages, and threaten to 



IMMORTALITY AND HEAVEN 



8i 



overwhelm them, happy are they that 
can go in boats to the further shore ; 
and happy, also, are they that can get 
there even by swimming upon planks 
and logs, for to escape from their peril 
is what they seek. Though the short 
voyage on a plank or log, with many 
changes from solid to liquid, is not 
particularly agreeable, yet he that 
makes it forgets when he has reached 
the shore, and abandoned his plank 
or log, how he got across. And in 
this hfe it makes much difference 
what our body is, but when this life is 
ended we shall not remember whether 
we were homely or handsome, stalwart 
and strong, or weak and effeminate. 

349. Future Disclosure of Char- 
acter. — If you go into the great 
manufactories at Lowell and Law- 
rence, that which you see is that which 
you never see elsewhere ; and that 
which you see elsewhere is what you 
almost never see there. You see 
there, not colors, but dirty dye-vats ; 
wool rather than thread, or thread 
rather than fabrics. Instead of seeing 
rolls of finished carpeting or cloth, 
you hear the rattling of looms, 
spinning-jennies, and other ma- 
chinery. These things, which absorb 
your attention, you leave behind you, 
when you go out ; whereas it is in 
New York, in London, in the great 
commercial mart, that you see the 
fabric which is produced by them. 

Now this world is a great rattling 
manufactory, and all these physical 
things are but the stationary engines 
and looms. They are the things that 
men never carry with them from this 
world. And yet, how important they 
are ! Our life, as it were, is placed in 
a loom, and woven by these things. 
It rolls up, and is hidden, as fast as 
it is woven ; and it is to be taken out 
of the loom only when we leave this 
world. We shall see the pattern of it 



only when we abandon the things 
which act upon us here. 

350. Man's Need of Another Life. — 
How can you bear the infirmities of life, 
the sufferings of the body, and the chaf- 
ings of the soul, which it is impossible to 
escape here below ? These things are 
so many light-fingered robbers, that 
filch perpetually something of our 
being ; and, if I have nothing but this 
life, spare me from it. It is not long 
enough, if this is all that there is to 
me. It but kindles expectation ; it 
but sharpens sensibility ; it but renders 
me capable of greater misery. It can- 
not satisfy my capacity for enjoyment. 
But, O, if I have another life ; if God 
is mine ; if heaven is mine ; if all the 
noble redeemed in heaven are my 
elder brethren ; if every step here is 
carrying me nearer home — what to me 
are burdens and troubles ? 

351. Earth and Heaven. — When a 
man is on the sea, and is seasick, he 
says, "I would not go through this 
another day for ten thousand conti- 
nents, if I could help it " ; but when 
he reaches land and sees one thing 
that is worth seeing, he says, " I 
would go ten voyages for the sake of 
seeing this." It is not wise for a man 
to put too much emphasis upon the in- 
cidental experiences of this life. 

352. The Lost Shall be Found. — 
Whatever we lose here that is worth 
weeping for we shall find again. 
When man reaps there is something 
for the gleaner's hands behind him. 
He shakes out many kernels for the 
soil, and drops many heads of wheat 
for the gleaner. But when God reaps 
he loses not one kernel, and drops not 
one single heavy head of grain. And 
whatever that is good has been taken 
from you — every straw, and every 
kernel, and every head — shall be 
garnered. Only that will remain in 
the earth which you would fain give 



82 



NATURAL LIFE 



to the earth, while that which the 
heart claims, and must have if it live, 
awaits you. Great are the joys that 
are before you, but they do not lie 
level with the earth. 

353. A Tokerj of Love. — These two 
uses of precious stones — that by which 
monarchs conferred honor upon their 
favorites, and that by which lovers 
gave token of their afifection for each 
other, with names inscribed, and 
known only to love — are here blended. 
And this, I apprehend, is the origin of 
the figure of our text, " To him that 
overcometh will I give a white stone, 
and in the stone a new name written, 
which no man knoweth saving he that 
receiveth it." What is meant by a 
white stone I do not know, but I pre- 
fer to think that it was an opal — the 
most human of all stones. The dia- 
mond is the more spiritual — there is 
less of color and more of suggestion in 
it; but the opal has in it more sym- 
pathy, more feeling, more wondrous 
beauty, more of those moods that be- 
long to the human heart ; and of all 
the stones that are worn to signify 
human affection, none is to be com- 
pared to the opal. And methinks, 
when God makes this promise of the 
white stone, it is as if he said, " I will 
cut your love-name in an opal, and as 
your King and Lover I will give it to 
you, and no man shall know the 
meaning of that name but you your- 
self." 

354. Things Hoped for in Immor- 
tality. — We may hope that when we 
bid adieu to our mortal life, we shall 
leave behind some things which are 
necessary to the exigencies of our 
condition here, but which will not be 
necessary to our state there. Our 
imagination, our reason, our affec- 
tions, and our moral sentiments, we 
shall doubtless carry with us ; our 
identity will remain ; and I suppose all 



our faculties will be substantially the 
same : but the conditions of our life 
will be so different that we shall be 
like men taken from poverty into 
abundance ; from winter into sum- 
mer ; from a cold climate and a frozen 
soil, into a soil never locked by ice, 
and skies that never know frost. Our 
life there shall be ampler, fuller, no- 
bler, than it is here. 

355. " Things Which God Hath 
Prepared." — The darkened sphere of 
this terraqueous globe lies or moves 
within a vast spiritual sphere which is 
filled full of extraordinary develop- 
ments and phenomena. There is a 
glorious kingdom which human lan- 
guage is inadequate to describe ; and 
we are the heirs of it. We are heirs 
of God jointly with Jesus Christ our 
Elder Brother. It is something too 
large to be depicted, far beyond any 
eye, or ear, or mental conceptions. 

No man ever looked into the stellar 
universe, however strong a glass he 
might have, who did not feel that 
there was distance upon distance, dis- 
tance upon distance, and that though 
there might be a glass that could 
resolve and define the hitherward 
planets, none ever was built or would 
be built that could probe the universe 
to the utmost bound, and know what 
this vast thing meant — whence it came, 
and whither it went. So it is in re- 
gard to this thought of the apostle. 
There is that going on which is be- 
yond our senses, beyond time, beyond 
matter ; and though faith may get 
glimpses of it, though the imagination 
may as it were flash out something to 
show us what is taking place, no 
thought can resolve it. We shall find 
it out when we get there, but never 
before with any fullness of vision or 
any ample power of interpretation. 

356. Splendor of the Future. — Im 
agine an Esquimaux striving to form 



IMMORTALITY AND HEAVEN 



83 



some idea of the tropics from the 
missionary's description. What has 
he to form an idea from but the moss 
and stinted shrubs that scarcely grow 
higher than his feet, and the flowers 
that blossom in the midst of northern 
glaciers ? Would he form a concep- 
tion of the briUiant fruits of the tropics ? 
He must grub the ground for berries, 
which are all the fruit that the frigid 
zone knows. And from the creeping 
vine of the wintergreen-berries, from 
the huckleberries, and such like things, 
he is to form his ideal of those mag- 
nificent parasitic plants which fill the 
tropical forests. These little berries 
are his oranges and bananas and pine- 
apples. He attempts, shivering in the 



midsummer, under the iceberg, to 
form a conception of the everlasting 
pomp and glory of the equatorial 
region. And when he has formed a 
conception of it, he cheers himself, 
and sighs, and wishes he could see it. 
But what does he know of it ? 

And that which is to be when you 
shall have left these mortal bodies, 
when you shall have experienced the 
sensations of the new life, when you 
shall have unfolded and come into the 
realm where things are no longer 
symbols but reahties ; when the phys- 
ical shall have ceased, and the spiritual 
shall have been ushered in — that will 
surpass any ideal that your highest 
imagination has ever pictured. 



SOCIAL LIFE 




BEECHER AT FORTY 
Photograph by Whipple. 1853 



SOCIAL LIFE 



XI, MENTAL, EMOTIONAL, AND MORAL 

^ALITIES 



I, Mental Qualities. 

357. Effects of Life on the Soul. — 
Nothing moves in this world that it 
does not exert an influence on the uni- 
verse in some degree. The flight of a 
bird, the faUing of a leaf to the earth, 
the vibration of a note, anything 
which causes the least impact, changes 
the whole universe, as streams that 
run to the sea and empty themselves 
into it change the sea, and change the 
channel from the top to the bottom. 
The sea roars and murmurs, and then 
wipes its brow, and is calm again ; but 
it is never the same sea. The waves 
striking the shore, and retreating, 
never leave it as it was. 

Now, if it is so in hard matter, if it is 
so in visible and physical things, how 
much more is it so in such mobile and 
subtle elements as those which consti- 
tute the soul's life ! How much more 
is it so with the soul which changes at 
a glance or a thought, which is more 
mobile than a thermometer, and which 
is more sensitive than any barometer ! 
Yet men are not conscious of it. 

358. The Man of Few Talents. — 
If I had been made a firefly, it would 
not become me to say, " If God had 
only made me a star, to shine always, 
then I would shine." It is my duty, 
if I am a firefly, to fly and sparkle, and 
fly and sparkle ; not to shut my wings 
down over my phosphorescent self, be- 
cause God did not make me a sun or 
a star. 

359. Self- Judgment. — If all other 
men were but four feet high, a man of 
five feet would be considered a giant. 
If he puts his standard low enough, 



87 



a man always can judge favorably 
about himself. 

360. Common Sense Better Than 
Uncommon. — Although cake is de- 
cidedly better than bread, once in a 
while, yet for every day eating bread 
is a great deal better than cake. God 
never made anything that was so good 
to drink all the time as cold water. 
If it be milk, if it be any of the long 
catalogue of artificial drinks, still the 
best taste for all the time is no taste at 
all, in the mouth. Water gives that, 
and nothing else does. 

And so it is in regard to the econo- 
mies of the mind. The best sense 
for all work and for all time is com- 
mon sense. Discrimination, quick 
judgment, just judgment, in minute 
things, operating all the time — that is 
the best. 

361. Intellect and Emotion. — We 
come into the knowledge of truths of 
fact and matter by the mediation of 
our senses ; but there is a higher realm 
than that of fact and matter. There 
is an invisible realm where emotion, 
where sentiment, where spirituality re- 
side. We come into communion with 
that realm by the understanding, 
through the mediation of our personal 
emotions and feelings. 

Take a little air, or strain, which an 
organist may give you. Let him, by 
and by, after playing it on one or two 
small stops, introduce another stop — 
a hautbois or a wood-flute, for in- 
stance ; and you will see that while 
the air remains, there is a new quality 
in it. Let him introduce another stop, 
and another ; and you will see that it 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



is still the same melody and harmony, 
but that something additional has 
made it richer, sweeter, stronger. 

Now, it is so with the human mind. 
The intellect is looking at things ; and 
if all the emotions were shut off, and 
were not allowed to color them, how 
barren, how unrich they would be ! 
But you draw one emotion, and in- 
stantly the things perceived through 
the intellect are affected by that emo- 
tion. As in playing a tune, every ad- 
ditional stop that is introduced adds 
a new quality to the sound, so the 
understanding is modified, changed, 
enriched, by this or that emotion. 

When the intellect is thus electrified, 
magnetized, polarized, it comes to a 
recognition of the greater truths of 
affection and sentiment. For in- 
stance, a man who is absolutely with- 
out love for children or pets will sit in 
a nursery where children are playing, 
without any sort of feeling ; but put 
me where those children are, and I 
am a-sparkle all over, because I love 
children. The moment my percep- 
tive reason and my reflective reason 
are shot through with the magnetism 
of this emotion of love for children, 
I become competent to perceive 
thoughts and feelings and relations 
which I never could have perceived 
by any ordinary process of thinking. 
It is the thinking power, waked up 
and acting through the color of an 
emotion, that brings one into relation 
to truths belonging to that emotion. 

362. The Image of God. — If one 
should send me from abroad a richly 
carved and precious statue, and the 
careless drayman who tipped it upon 
the sidewalk before my door should 
give it such a blow that one of the 
boards of the box should be wrenched 
off, I should be frightened lest the 
hurt had penetrated farther, and 
wounded it within. But if, taking off 



the remaining boards and the swath- 
ing-bands of straw or cotton, the 
statue should come out fair and un- 
harmed, I should not mind the box, 
but should cast it carelessly away. 

Now, every man has committed to 
him a statue, moulded by the oldest 
master, not of Cupid, or Venus, or 
Psyche, or Jupiter, or Apollo, but the 
image of God ; and he who is solicit- 
ous only for outward things, who is 
striving to protect merely the body 
from injuries and reverses, is letting the 
statue go rolling away into the gutter, 
while he is picking up the fragments 
and lamenting the ruin of the box. 

363. Human Spirit Unequally De- 
veloped. — In point of fact, not one- 
fifth part of the average of the mind 
of man is developed at all. If the 
human body were to be developed as 
the human mind is, we should have 
monstrous feet, and monstrous legs, 
and monstrous hands, and a mon- 
strous stomach, and a little button of 
a head surmounting them. We have 
all the basilar instincts in power among 
men. Whatever implies appetite, or 
passion, or force, or executiveness — 
all cunning, all deceitfulness, all those 
tendencies by which the lower animal 
nature either conserves or defends 
itself — these elements are strong in 
men without schooling. The social 
instincts are next strong, but irregular ; 
they are without any systematic de- 
velopment. The intellect is compara- 
tively feeble here. Only parts are de- 
veloped ; and those are parts that have 
some relation to physical and profita- 
ble uses. But the moral nature of 
most men is almost terra incognita. 
That part of the human soul which 
lies the most nearly in communion 
with God is the most desolate. 

364. Mind Should Dominate. — We 
do not blame a man, when a sliver 
enters the flesh, and excites the nerve, 



MENTAL OUALITIES 



89 



and the inflammation extends through- 
out the whole system, if he is fevered ; 
we do not blame him, under such cir- 
cumstances, if the distemperature of 
the whole nervous system makes him 
insensitive to pleasure, — for what if the 
sun does shine to him who has the 
gout? What if showers do descend, 
to the man who sufifers from neural- 
gia? What if the flowers bloom on, 
and the seasons send forth all their 
treasures, and the morning and even- 
ing are made glorious by the shooting 
of splendors along the horizon, to a 
man of a diseased nerve ? They bring 
him no gifts, and they have no joy for 
him. This is true of the body ; but 
ought it to be true of that which is 
superior to the body — the mind itself, 
that is meant to be master of its own 
economy, and the commonwealth of 
the soul ? 

365. Impulses to be Guarded. — 
While I sit writing, I say to myself : 
" The moment I have finished this 
sentence I will take the blotting paper 
and prevent, as I turn the leaf over, 
blotting the other page ; " and in fin- 
ishing the sentence I quite forget it ; 
and yet, as I am about to turn over 
the leaf my hand goes out for some- 
thing. What it is I do not know ; and 
I stop and think, "What did I reach 
my hand out here for?" I feel that 
there must be some reason, and I at- 
tempt to recall it ; and at last it dawns 
on my mind, and I say, "Why, I 
thought when I was writing that sen- 
tence that I would put the blotting 
paper on here." I had forgotten it in 
my mind, but in my hand I had not. 
What has my brain done to my hand ? 
It has, as it were, made a brain in it, 
so that when detached from the foun- 
tain and center of thought it would 
seem to have in its feelings a sort of 
subordinate repeating brain-power. 
The hand tends to do what the brain 



impresses upon it. Be careful of brief 
impulses : they may come to mischief. 

366. Trained Perceptions. — I was in 
the Stock Exchange in New York one 
day, and twenty lunatic asylums let 
loose would not have made more 
racket ; but when the confusion was 
going on I stood by the side of the 
secretary, and I saw him writing in a 
book, as fast as he could, definite 
things. There were the bellowing 
bulls of Bashan, shouting, hallooing, 
yelling, in every direction, and I could 
hear nothing but a terrific crash of 
sounds ; and I said to him, after the 
Babel had subsided a little, " How 
can you understand that? " Said he, 
"I have got accustomed to it, so that 
I know just what is said — who buys, 
what is bought, and how much. 
These proceedings will be heard from, 
and you will see that my record is cor- 
rect." He said, "You can under- 
stand it a little if I illustrate it by a 
familiar instance. Suppose a mother 
is at a party, and her babe is in the 
adjoining room ; and suppose, by and 
by, in the midst of the great buzz and 
hum of conversation and laughter, that 
babe cries, that one sound will be 
heard by her above all the noise in the 
room, and she will go immediately to 
the relief of her little one. I have 
trained myself so that one sound in 
this tremendous noise weighs in my 
ear more than all the other sounds, 
and I put down the thing that I know 
is important." 

367. Trained Calmness. — A man is 
like a horse. An unbroken horse will 
run away on some fright. An intelli- 
gent and well-broken horse will not. 
And a man that is well-trained, in time 
of trouble stands still and holds him- 
self steadily. A man that is not well- 
broken just at that time breaks the 
halter, and rushes down the steep 
precipice, it may be, or sticks fast in 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



the morass, and does damage to him- 
self and all that he carries. There 
are very few men that have ever been 
well-broken. 

368. Lower Powers in Higher Life. 
— Just as you might conceive of a 
steam-engine running in the basement 
of a building, and, by bands and 
straps, turning one wheel here and an- 
other there for the carrying on various 
kinds of business in the rooms above, 
so we may conceive of combativeness 
and destructiveness as producing 
effects in the higher realms of life. If 
you find a man without combativeness 
— which gives vigor of attack, and de- 
structiveness — which furnishes conti- 
nuity of effort, then you find a man like 
grain which has not enough stiffness 
in the stem to enable it to stand up, 
and which will break and fall and rot 
on the ground. 

369. Mind-Hunger. — I sometimes 
ask a driver who has gone almost 
every day for years past conspicuous 
buildings, " Will you tell me what that 
building is?" "I cannot," he says ; 
" I do not know what building it is." 
"Did you ever ask anybody?" 
"No." "Did you ever see it?" 
"Yes, I have seen it." "Did you 
ever feel any curiosity to know what it 
was?" "No." He has been so 
busy looking after passengers and 
taking the pay that he has never 
thought or had the curiosity to ask 
about such a thing as that ! Old-fash- 
ioned drivers in New England knew 
every fence-post, every stone in every 
fence, every house, every man, and 
his father, and his grandfather, and 
how they married, and how much they 
were worth, and all about them ; and 
no man could ride with him that he 
did not squeeze him like a sponge, and 
get out of him everything that was in 
him. It is called curiosity ; but blessed 
be curiosity ! I like it when it is the 



result of hunger — thought-hunger and 
mind-hunger. 

370. Mind-Force and Muscle-Force. 
— Here was Esau, who represented 
brute force, which is always at the 
moment strongest, but at the end 
weakest. And here was Jacob, timid, 
cautious, politic, and thoughtful. At 
the first, such a man always seems to 
be inferior ; but in the end he always 
comes out ahead. So it was with these 
two patriarchs. To the end of his life 
Esau was a man of valor ; and if Jacob 
had resorted to force Esau would have 
swept away all his possessions : but 
Jacob managed him. When he re- 
turned from his uncle Laban's with 
flocks and herds, Esau came with 
bands to meet him ; but Jacob was too 
much for Esau. If they had gone to 
battle Esau would have smote Jacob 
hip and thigh ; but diplomatic Jacob 
fixed it all right. He talked so 
smoothly that he concihated Esau, 
they made up their quarrels, and one 
went down to Edom, and the other 
went back to Palestine. 

Now, in the history of the world 
does not strength of muscle perform 
an inferior part ? Is it not thought, is 
it not foresight, is it not connected 
thought, is it not persistent thought, is 
it not brain, that in the end governs? 
Muscle is very good, but it takes the 
second place. It may be first-born, 
but its birthright is gone just as soon 
as the brain has a chance to manage 
and contrive. It is thinking-power 
that governs. 

371. "We Know in Part." — I was 
struck with a remark that a man once 
made to me. To my mind he was a 
marvel of learning. He seemed thor- 
oughly educated in every direction. 
As now there is not a tree in the forest 
which, if you tap it, will not run sap, 
so there was not a side on which you 
could touch him where his knowledge 



MENTAL QUALITIES 



91 



did not seem complete. I said to him 
one day, " If I knew a tithe of what 
you know, I should think myself very 
fortunate." Said he, " Henry, I seem 
to myself like a basket in which are 
being carried away the fragments of a 
hotel — a bit of this, the fag-end of 
that, and all sorts of things jumbled 
up together. I do not know anything 
except little fragmentary parts of this, 
that, and the other." This remark 
made a deep impression on my mind, 
lodging there like a seed in the soil ; 
and I have learned, not by knowing 
so much myself, but by seeing how 
little they know who know a great 
deal, that no philosopher, no scholar, 
no poet, no inspired priest, no man of 
any considerable understanding, ever 
lived who did not feel in the end, " I 
have opened the faculties of my intel- 
lect a little way ; but I have not de- 
veloped their full power." 

372. Genius not to be Suppressed. 
— A genius may be defined to be a 
man full of tendencies that are not 
only of a kind but also of a strength 
which shall enable them to burst the 
external shell or the rind, and grow; 
and when you talk about an undevel- 
oped genius you talk about an un- 
hatched egg, that very soon turns the 
other way ! Men that have genius 
have power to develop that genius. 
There are a great many persons who 
think they are geniuses, though they 
stand hke unlighted candles on the 
shelf. If they were lighted and gave 
out a hght, you might call them so; 
but as they neither give out hght nor 
can kindle themselves, and are noth- 
ing but tallow and wick, they repre- 
sent a great many persons that think 
they might be geniuses if they only 
had been born rich, or if they only 
had education. Thousands of people 
mistake susceptibility to the effects 
produced by genius for the power of 



producing those effects themselves. 
When a man has genius he knows it, 
and the world knows it, too. 

373. Obligations of Genius. — Gen- 
ius, so far from having its prerogatives, 
its inspirations and its rights alone, has 
its duties, too. How contrary to this 
has been the public sentiment of the 
world ! Men refuse to lay the law of 
Christian integrity upon such men as 
Byron. He was a great genius. All 
the more corrupt and wicked was it 
that he employed genius in such a way 
as to disturb the purity of mankind. 
If men were to do to-day the things 
that Goethe allowed himself to do, 
how many there would be to rise up 
and say, " You are not to expect from 
a great genius such a narrow way of 
living." We ought to expect from 
genius a nobler way of life than from 
anybody else. In the proportion in 
which men of genius surpass their fel- 
low-men, they must be the nurses, the 
guardians, the teachers, the example 
and the inspiration, of their fellows. 

374. Influence, Independent of Cir- 
cumstances. — Go into that little closet- 
room, not as large as this platform, in 
which Jonathan Edwards wrote his 
Treatise on the Will, in a cane-bot- 
tomed chair (a man promised to give 
it to me, but did not keep his word), 
and would you say that in such a 
room, about eight feet square, with no 
furniture but a chair and a table, it 
was not possible for a man to write an 
immortal treatise ? You would have 
him sit on a meeting-house steeple, 
and write under the broad canopy of 
heaven. You would have the place 
where he worked bear some proportion 
to his magnificent treatise. But what 
a man can do does not depend upon 
the place he is in. His head and 
heart determine this. You may put 
him where you please, he does not 
care. It does not make any difference 



92 



SOCIAL LIFE 



whether a bird sits on the highest or 
on the lowest bough of a tree, his song 
fills the air all around about. He 
sits, to all intents and purposes, wher- 
ever his song goes. 

375. Imperfection of Great Men. — 
" But, father," said Rose, "is it not a 
pity that one so good should not be 
better ? ' ' 

" Certainly it is. What then ? We 
are glad to gather thirty bushels of 
wheat from an acre of ground, but 
there were two tons of straw and chaff 
required to grow the wheat. Would 
you have a man all grain ? Yet, 
worshiping is natural ; and our first 
drift, when one affects us well, is to 
begin shaping him in our thoughts to 
an ideal perfectness. Then comes the 
shock of disclosure. Everybody is 
imperfect; and strong natures, strong 
enough to overturn old errors, and 
fight great battles, are likely to be too 
strong to walk safely in harness and 
drag our phaetons and chaises! " 

376. Selfishness of Culture. — The 
burglar is at the door. The children 
lie asleep. Treasure is scattered 
about the house. The householder, 
peering down and seeing the burglar, 
hurries on some scanty garments, and 
slips out at the back-door, and takes 
himself off, for fear that something 
might hurt him ! Are there not men 
who are so refined, who are so cul- 
tured, that they have the very attar, 
or at least the very concentrated es- 
sence, of selfishness, and live in a per- 
petual negation of risk, and in con- 
tinuous indolence ? They hazard 
nothing. All they do is to keep 
themselves respectable. It is base, it 
is cowardly. 

377. Dangers of Refinement. — As a 
man wandering up in the Swiss moun- 
tains out from the lower and warmer 
valleys, finds that he is leaving popu- 
lation further and further behind him, 



and that it becomes snowy and cold as 
he rises; so there are men in society 
who become as cold as a glacier or 
the ever-snow-clad peaks of the moun- 
tains. And though these men are in 
a hundred respects superior to those 
with whom they compare themselves, 
yet there is one fatal point in their 
case, and that is, that they have taken 
all this superior culture and all these 
refining influences, and the result of 
them in their lives, to separate be- 
tween themselves and God. And I 
say to those who are the most deli- 
cately organized ; who are the most 
susceptible to taste ; who have an eye 
that in a day sees more beauty than 
the clown sees in an age ; whose lip 
is full of rapture over the marvels of 
antiquity ; who have commerce with 
that which is rich, and fine, and 
noble ; but who leave out from their 
view God and their fellow-men — I say 
to them, The publican and the harlot 
are more likely to be changed, and to 
return to God, than you are. 

378. Equivalents in Temperament. 
— Nobody is without his equivalents. 
If a man is very impulsive, he says, 
" O, if I could be as cool as that man 
is ! " The equator is always talking 
about icebergs, and icebergs are al- 
ways talking about the equator. If a 
man is very phlegmatic, he says, " It 
takes me longer to get a-going than it 
does my neighbor to get through. I 
wish that I was quick." The other 
says, " I am hke powder and 1 go off 
like powder. I wish I was cool like 
this man." Nobody, I say, is without 
his equivalents. If you are phleg- 
matic, you have disadvantages which 
an impulsive man has not ; but you 
also have advantages which he has 
not. You have your platform, and he 
has his ; and you are not to stand 
looking and coveting each other's pe- 
culiarities. 



MENTAL QUALITIES 



93 



379. Imagination. — The imagina- 
tion — divinest of mental faculties — is 
God's self in the soul. All our other 
faculties seem to me to have the brown 
touch of earth on them ; but this one 
carries the very livery of heaven. It 
is God's most supernal faculty, in- 
terpreting to us the difference between 
the material and the immaterial, and 
the difference between the visible and 
invisible ; teaching us how to take 
material and visible things and carry 
them up into the realm of the invisible 
and the immaterial, and how to bring 
down immaterial and invisible things, 
and embody them in visible and ma- 
terial symbols. 

380. Human Experience Transitory. 
— The mind itself, the noblest work of 
God on earth, appears to run through 
periods, just as flowers do. It is in 
the bud, and is weak because it has 
not yet come to itself ; then it blos- 
soms, and comes to maturity ; and 
then it seems to fade out again, or to 
pass back into that great nothingness 
from which everything appears to 
come forth. Our thoughts come, and 
crease time as meteors crease the sky, 
and then disappear in the darkness 
again. Our very affections seem, like 
lamps, to burn out. And if we look 
back upon the sum of the experience 
of just one generation, nothing seems 
so fugacious, so unsubstantial, so ut- 
terly unsatisfying, as the unrecorded 
life of thrice ten myriad hearts that 
throbbed, and loved or hated, feared 
or hoped, trusted or mourned betrayal, 
only one generation ago. 

381. Complexity of Man's Nature. — 
Put a partly trained workman in the 
midst of that great city of sounds, the 
organ. Some of those mighty pipes 
are so large that he cannot tune and 
manage them. There are so many, 
and he is so ignorant of them, that no 
sooner does he go in and work at one. 



and come out to the key -board to try 
it, than, though that may be proxi- 
mately correct, when he draws another 
there is discord elsewhere. When he 
finds that there is a clashing and bat- 
thng of sounds in the instrument, back 
he goes to rectify the fault of the of- 
fending pipe ; and in doing that he 
produces conflict somewhere else. So, 
as soon as he gets one stop right, 
others are deranged. He is incompe- 
tent, with his want of knowledge and 
experience, to manage this complex 
instrument, which is the fruit of ages. 
It is only by long years of study and 
practice that he can become familiar 
with it in all its parts. 

Man is vaster and more complex 
than any cathedral organ. His facul- 
ties are more potential than any 
sounding pipes. His nature, above 
and below, is more capable of infinite 
expansion. He learns himself slowly. 
And now, after we have learned for 
five or six thousand, and it may be 
for ten or fifteen thousand, years, we 
have but just begun to learn what is 
the capacity of the human mind, and 
what are those relations which are in- 
creasing as fast as we increase. 

382. Complexity of Life — There is 
many a man who could play a tune 
on the organ with one finger, picking 
it out, as it were, who is not able to 
take a very complicated harmony, re- 
quiring both hands and both feet, and 
carrying all the parts on successfully 
to the end ; and life is so vast and 
complex that though a man is compe- 
tent to any individual part of it, yet if 
he has to take the whole of it to-day, 
to-morrow, in sickness, in health, when 
pressed by business, when beset by 
temptations, when under the influence 
of excitements in the community, when 
stimulated by joy or depressed by sor- 
row, when carrying burdens or when 
buoyed up by prosperity, when sub- 



94 



SOCIAL LIFE 



jected to all the moods and tenses of 
human life — then can he do it ? 

383. Inharmonious Faculties. — Some 
people's heads are mere lodging- 
houses of faculties ; each lodger minds 
his own business, and meddles as lit- 
tle as possible with others. After a 
whole life, it cannot be perceived that 
the social affections have derived the 
least influence from the moral senti- 
ments by whose side they have lived 
scores of years. And the reverse, also, 
is witnessed, when the affections have 
neither softened nor warmed the moral 
sentiments, nor seemed to have had 
any intercourse with them. Many 
men's passions act without curb or in- 
fluence from the reason, and are lim- 
ited and restrained only by their own 
selfish interests. 

384. Hidden Thoughts.-The thoughts 
which you hide are the most precious. 
The shells which the sea rolls out on 
shore are not its best. The pearls 
have to be dived for. 

385. Ineffective Thinking. — How 
much men think day by day that is 
only thinking ! In my orchards to-day 
there are, I believe, on single cherry- 
trees thousands of blossoms ; and prob- 
ably all but about a hundred or two 
of those will drop without a cherry 
having formed under them. Men are 
like such trees. They breed thoughts 
by the millions, that result in action 
only in the scores and the hundreds. 

386. Empty Meditation. — Medita- 
tion is largely a running of the mind- 
mill ; and it does not do any good to 
run the mill when there is no grist in 
it. Yet many "meditate" who have 
nothing to meditate on. The great 
majority of men are unable to supply 
themselves with food for continuous 
reflection. 

387. The Soul to be Protected. — We 
protect the eye, the nerve-woven skin; 
we learn to be vigilant without volition 



for the body, and even when absorbed 
in thought there is yet a subtle piloting 
of the body by the mind, I know not 
how ; we see the stone without seem- 
ing to see it ; we avoid the ditch with- 
out knowing that we noticed it ; we 
lift the foot with a regulated gradation 
to meet the varying surface of the 
road, quite unconsciously ; we instinc- 
tively discern the qualities of things, 
and accommodate ourselves to them. 

But the soul is more sensitive than 
the body. It has a greater surface, it 
has more branches, it has more arms 
and feet, it has more nerves, it has 
more injurable attributes, than the 
body. It carries them, too, amidst 
flying missiles countless, endless in 
succession. When the fire touches 
gauze, it is too late then to interfere ; 
you must not let it touch it. When 
the rap is given to the crystal vase, it 
is too late then to save it ; you must 
keep it free from the blow. When the 
frost has struck the flower, watching 
is then remediless ; you must keep it 
where the frost cannot reach it. We 
must keep sensitive things free from 
rude contacts. That is true wisdom in 
practical hfe. And so of hundreds of 
moral things. We must keep them 
away from evil, so that it shall not 
overtake them. A man must carry 
himself, not so as to repent of harm, 
but so as, by constant vigilance and 
forethought, to prevent harm from be- 
falling him. 

388. Clear and Cloudy Mental 
Weather. — The execution of a deHcate 
task depends chiefly on the fine con- 
dition of a man's faculties. On some 
days the mind comes up out of sleep, 
like the sun in a clear October morn- 
ing. There is neither cloud nor haze. 
The thoughts and feehngs move in 
unison, and the tongue, touched from 
within, like a magnet, draws to itself 
fittinjr words and sentences. 



MENTAL QUALITIES 



95 



Then come the cloudy days. Ill- 
assorted thoughts procure for them- 
selves a disagreeable utterance. We 
spoil whatever we touch. We do 
nothing lightly, deftly, wisely. The 
astronomer must defer his observa- 
tions when clouds are in the sky. In 
some of the more delicate operations 
of mechanics, the workman will not 
touch a tool on days when, as he says, 
"his hand is dead." What lawyer 
has not lost cases because he came 
before the court and jury with his 
head wearied and his whole body 
jaded by long-continued and exhaust- 
ing excitements? What doctor has 
not lost patients by being called, after 
sleepless nights, with a stupid brain, 
to a case requiring insight, precision, 
and instant action ? What minister 
has not spoiled a good subject by a 
poor sermon, because the Sabbath 
had come round and he must preach, 
in spite of catarrh and influenza? 

389. Faculties Brighten by Use. — 
As in the body the muscles which you 
are accustomed to use most come to 
have a spontaneity, while those that 
have been Httle used are comparatively 
slow and clumsy, so in the mind. The 
parts which you use most you use the 
best and most skillfully, while those 
which you use but little or not at all, 
you use the worst and least skillfully. 

390. Compensation in Character. — 
We usually stretch the skirts of one 
good quality to cover the blank made 
by the absence of a dozen others. 

391. Multiplicity of Thoughts. — It 
would be easier for a man to count 
the drops of a river that flows by him, 
deep and rapid, than to count the 
thoughts and feelings and fancies that 
make the river of life which proceeds 
from the soul. 

392. Mind- Work at Night. — There 
is a reason why students prefer the 
night to the day for their labors. 



Through the day their thoughts are 
diverted into a thousand streams ; at 
night they settle into pools, which, 
deep and undisturbed, reflect the 
stars. But night-labor in time will 
destroy the student ; for it is marrow 
from his own bones with which he fills 
his lamp. 

393. Thinking and Praying. — Did 
you ever know a person who could 
pray down an arithmetic ? Did you 
ever know one, who, going to school 
and finding himself puzzled by a tough 
problem, could get it solved by asking 
God to solve it for him? Did you 
ever know anybody to accomplish 
anything intelligently except by intel- 
ligent head-work? 

394. The Fertile Mind Natural 

genius is but the soil, which, let alone, 
runs to weeds. If it is to bear fruit 
and harvests worth the reaping, no 
matter how good the soil is, it must be 
ploughed and tilled with incessant 
care. 

395. Thinking in a Murk. — The old- 
fashioned way of preparing a sermon 
was when a man sat down with his 
pipe, and smoked and "thought," as 
he called it ; and after two or three 
hours, in which he has been in a 
muggy, fumbling state of mind, he at 
last comes out with the product of it 
for the pulpit. It is like unleavened 
bread, doughy, dumpy and heavy ; 
hard to eat, and harder to digest. 
There has been nothing put in it to 
vitalize it. 

396. A Noble Thought. — A man 
might frame and let loose a star to roll 
in its orbit, and yet not have done so 
memorable a thing before God as he 
who lets go a golden-orbed thought to 
roll through the generations of time. 

397. Wise in His Own Conceit. — 
The opinion of Solomon is not shared 
by men very generally. Conceit is 
very much in repute. People who are 



96 



SOCIAL LIFE 



conceited by no means think they are 
fools : they think that Solomon was 
one. 

398. Self-Absorption. — Do not be a 
spy on yourself. A man who goes 
thinking of himself all the time, with 
critical analysis, whether he is doing 
this, that, or any other thing, — turning 
himself over as if he were a goose on 
a spit before the fire, and basting him- 
self with good resolutions, — is simply 
belittling himself. 

399. Mistakes. — As the axe is made 
sharp by that which it loses on the 
grindstone, so men are made sharp by 
that which they lose through blunders 
that fit them for the next encounter. 

400. Self-Examination. — Men pull 
down their hats when they don't want 
folks to recognize them, and sometimes 
men want to disguise their own famil- 
iar faults, not to recognize them ; but 
after all there are hours when every 
man is honest with himself, and sits in 
judgment on his courses. Is not this, 
the end of a year, time for a change ? 

401. Self-Revelation. — There will 
come a time when what you spent 
your life in thinking will appear upon 
the canvas. Every day your hand 
dips the brush, and every faculty that 
you act under, and every motive, gives 
the color, and though you know it 
not, every man is thinking his own 
portrait. The canvas is above ; the 
man is working beneath. There will 
come an hour when every man shall 
stand in the presence of the all-reveal- 
ing light, and shall see himself— aj he is. 

2. Emotional Qualities. 

402. Thought and Feeling. — There 
is much contention among men 
whether thought or feeling is the bet- 
ter ; but feeling is the bow, and 
thought the arrow, and every good 
archer must have both. Alone, one is 
as helpless as the other. 



403. Belief With the Heart.— The 
great bulk of the questions about 
which men are to believe or not to be- 
lieve have reference to a kind of truth 
that you never can judge by pure, cold 
intellect. In other words, all social 
and all moral truths depend upon the 
affections. A man who carries a 
purely mathematical mind to the read- 
ing of John Milton is a fool. A man 
who should read Tennyson as a micro- 
scopist would examine an insect, to see 
just what and no more is there, how 
preposterous his conduct would be ! 
In investigations of matter, quantities 
and qualities of matter, close and care- 
ful intellectual research is necessary ; 
but in matters of imagination, poetry 
and art, cold intellect is as dead as a 
mummy three thousand years old. 

In the largest department, then, be- 
lief depends upon the feelings. I do 
not mean that it excludes the intellect. 
I do not mean that intuition and feel- 
ing are evidence alone. I mean that 
the investigating intellect is obliged to 
be in harmony and in communion with 
the feehngs that dominate the depart- 
ment where the truth lies. There is a 
great deal of mathematics in the sci- 
ence of music, yet music itself cannot 
be appreciated by the mere man of 
science without the sense or faculty of 
music in him. 

404. Faults of Full Natures. — As 
all good soils naturally run to weeds, 
so all rich natures naturally run to 
faults. It has sometimes been said 
that we cannot help loving men be- 
cause they are full of faults ; and there 
is more in that than we may at first 
suppose. Activity with mistakes is 
better than inactivity without mistakes. 
Life with the steam hissing all the time 
is better than death under any circum- 
stances. Life carries with it the lia- 
bility to error ; and so men that are 
ahve are continually at fault. If the 



EMOTIONAL OUALITIES 



97 



water in a bucket is shallow enough, 
it will never spill over, but if it is full 
to the brim it will spill over many 
times — for an even bucket of water 
never spilled over one side that it did 
not spill over the other side also. 

405. The Heart Uses the Head. — 
When any single feeling is strong in 
us, and kindled to white heat, the in- 
tellect perceives the truths which that 
feeling interprets, with a clearness and 
amazing accuracy which nothing else 
ever gives. The understanding is to 
the heart just what a field-glass is to 
the man that stands behind it and 
looks through it. In regard to all 
truths which begin in the feelings, the 
intellect is a mere medium. For in- 
stance, all questions belonging to taste 
depend upon xho. feeling of taste, and 
the intellect only interprets that feel- 
ing. All truths of justice depend upon 
ihe feeling of justice, and the intellect 
merely interprets that feeling. All 
truths of worship depend upon the feel- 
ing of veneration, and tfie intellect 
only expresses that feeling. All truths 
that spring from love and benevolence 
can be expressed by the intellect only 
so far as it has been imbued with these 
feelings. In the department of social 
and moral truth, the intellect knows 
nothing except what it has been taught 
by the feelings. 

406. Sordid Sense, Judging Senti- 
ment. — The disciples were sitting 
about — those strange men who, hav- 
ing consorted with Jesus for so many 
months and years, never could under- 
stand anything which was not right 
on the surface. They had Judas for 
spokesman ; but it is represented here 
as being the action of them all. These 
were practical men, men who had good 
sense. These were men who would 
laugh at sentiment. These were men 
who believed in things: and as to 
feelings, they thought no more about 



them than the farmer thinks of the 
birds which fly around through his 
trees and in the air. They are of no 
account to him. They do not lay 
eggs for him. They cannot be sold at 
market. They do not sing for him. 
They are all very well ; but what are 
the birds to him ? So the disciples sat 
there and looked on at that [action of 
Mary Magdalene] ; and the only thing 
they thought of was money. There 
was a royal heart doing obeisance to 
a royal heart ; and it was done, too, 
with wonderful suggestiveness to any 
one who had the sensibility to perceive 
it, and who could be in sympathy with 
any such act ; it was felt and honored 
by the Saviour himself, in a grand and 
glorious recognition. But here sat 
these very men whom he had been 
teaching on the mount and by the 
sea, in sermon and by parable, and 
by his own conduct ; and they came 
down stupidly to this, occurring near 
the end of his mission, and could not 
understand it at all. They judged it 
from the standpoint of merchandise. 

407. Feeling Before Reason in 
Higher Truth. — In regard to the truths 
of matter, it is certain that the less 
emotion there is, the more undisturbed 
will be that process by which, facts 
having been observed and coordi- 
nated, the relations of those facts, or 
the deductions of them, will be se- 
cured. In the lower category of 
truth, then — that of facts of matter 
and their relations to each other — the 
emotions are a disturbing force in rea- 
soning. 

But in the higher forms of truth, re- 
lating to thoughts of the mind and 
things of the spirit — moral, social, af- 
fectional, esthetic truth — conviction 
depends far more on the feelings than 
on the presentation of reasons or dy- 
namic quaUties. . . . What is just, is 
not apprehended by reason of an Intel- 



98 



SOCIAL LIFE 



lectual statement of what it is, but 
from a peculiar experience of con- 
science. A thing is beautiful, not ac- 
cording to rules and statements, but 
according to an esthetic experience 
in the man himself. You cannot make 
a man laugh because he ought to 
laugh. You may analyze a jest, or a 
flash of wit, and present it to a man, 
saying, " Here are the elements of 
mirth ; and these being presented to 
you as I now present them, if you are 
a rational being you will accept the 
statement of them, and laugh;" but 
nobody laughs so. People laugh first, 
and afterwards think why they laugh. 
The feeling of mirth is first excited ; 
and afterwards the intellect analyzes 
that which produced the laughter. It 
converts into an idea that which was 
first an emotion or an experience. 

408. The Power of Feeling. — As 
streams of water turn mill-wheels, 
night and day, themselves slender, 
yet powerful in their accumulation, so 
trickling heart-streams turn the great 
wheel of life's purposes. 

409. Delicacy. — Delicacy is a spring 
which God has sunk in the rock, which 
sends its quiet waters with music down 
the flowery hillside, and which is pure 
and transparent, because it has at the 
bottom no sediment. 

410. Emotion and Motion. — Al- 
though emotive men are sensitive to 
feeling, the unemotive men never use 
their feeling as a cascade to fill the air 
full of flying drop and vapor ; they 
use it rather as a mill-stream with 
which to turn the wheel of purpose 
and activity. 

411. Extremes of Emotional Na- 
tures. — The liability of men to have 
moods will never change, any more 
than the liability of the ocean to have 
tides will change. If a man is so 
made that his blood courses in his 
veins like tides in the Bay of Fundy, 



how can it be otherwise than that 
when the tides go out he shall be on 
the sand ? 

412. Unwritten Realities. — If all the 
emotions that rise in every soul through 
one single livelong day could address 
themselves either to the eye or to the 
ear, how many dramas that are never 
written would there be ! How many 
concerts that are never heard would 
play in the air ! What hope, what 
fear, what sorrow, what joy, what 
tenderness of love, what rudeness of 
anger, what despotism of pride, what 
throngs of ever-weaving fancies, what 
strange thoughts of things, or quahties 
of imagination, what faith, what enor- 
mous productiveness there is in the 
silence of every human soul, and how 
the unwritten realities of human life 
put to shame, whether in fearfulness 
or in grandeur, all that literature ever 
indited ! We lose, we waste the most 
precious part ; and human life, like an 
unstopped vase of effervescent and 
perishing quahty, exhales and throws 
off into the absolute and the eternal 
the very best portions of itself. 

413. High Feelings Transitory. — 
I have walked for hours in the red and 
yellow sea of the Louvre galleries, 
feeling a kind of sacred intoxication 
such as to render me almost uncon- 
scious of my bodily state ; but being 
too much to last, it soon passed away. 
... In its first form, a feeling, 
where it is an intense, vivid, conscious 
emotion, subsides quickly. It is a 
blaze, not a coal. 

414. Evanescence of Experiences. — 
Where is all that gay plumage which 
the trees lifted up some six months 
agone ? Where is all that purple 
garniture of the fields that delighted 
every eye that looked upon it? The 
fields are bare and russet, and the 
trees hold up their branches against 
the sky, without leaf or blossom of 



EMOTIONAL QUALITIES 



99 



fruit. Look back upon those ten 
thousand experiences which you passed 
through last year. How many of them 
can you revive ? How many of them 
could you now recite ? If narrated to 
you, how like the history in a novel 
would they be to you ! We are 
neither as happy nor as miserable as 
we think. 

415. Shallow Natures. — There be 
people who have ripples, but never 
waves ; who have surface feelings, but 
never depths of feeling. They never 
have deep convictions or deep emo- 
tions ; yet they are always shimmering 
and moving. They are persons that 
are like farms that have only had 
surface-plowing three or four inches 
deep, under which is a hard-pan 
through which neither root nor mois- 
ture can break, so that what is planted 
thereon has a sprinkling growth, and a 
meager existence. 

416. Great Feelings for Great Oc- 
casions. — I can understand, how in 
battle, a son, seeing the fatal stroke 
descending upon his father, might 
rush in and take it himself; or how 
father and mother might go into a 
burning house to save a child when 
the chances were ninety-nine in a 
hundred that they would perish. I 
can understand how a mother might 
deliberately calculate that her life will 
be sacrificed if she nurses her child 
through a fatal malady, that while the 
child will barely escape, she cannot 
possibly escape, and that she may say, 
" I am glad to lay down my life for 
my child." Such cases are excep- 
tional, but they may occur. If, how- 
ever, a person thirteen years old were 
to be examined for admission to this 
church and it should be said to him, 
" Now, my dear young friend, do you 
think you would be willing to lay 
down your life for the members of 
this church ? " he might, if he ba«f been 



taught to answer parrot-like, say, 
" Yes, sir," not knowing what else to 
say ; but if he spoke truly he would 
say, " No, I would not." He would 
not, and you would not. I call for 
volunteers. How many of you are 
willing to lay down your lives for the 
brethren ? You all sit still, I observe ; 
and you do right. You have not 
reached the state in which you feel 
such willingness. Yet there is pro- 
vision in you for the development of a 
feeling like that. It is possible for a 
man to rise to a state of exaltation and 
disinterested love in which he could 
easily give his life for another. 

417. Sharing the Good Things. — 
A person says, " I will put this clump 
of flowers under the parlor window." 
No, no ; put them by the gate. A 
thousand will see them there, where 
one would see them in that other 
place. A person says, " I will put 
this plant back where nobody can 
reach it." Well, do ; but put two close 
to the fence, where they can be 
reached. I like to see little hands go 
through the pickets and pluck off 
flowers. And if you say, " That is 
stealing," then let it be ; understood 
through all the neighborhood that it is 
not stealing. There are some who 
seem to have such a sense of property 
that if they had a hundred magnolia 
trees in full blossom on their premises, 
they would want the wind to blow from 
the north and south and east and west, 
so that all the fragrance would come 
into their own house ; whereas the true 
spirit would be a desire that a thou- 
sand others should be blessed by these 
bounties as well as themselves. 

418. Deep Emotion not Common. — 
I recollect being strongly impressed, 
on reading the account of an old 
castle in Germany, with two towers 
that stood up mighty, and far apart, 
between which an old baron stretched 



LofC. 



lOO 



SOCIAL LIFE 



large wires, thus making a huge 
<EoHan harp. The summer breezes 
played through these wires ; but there 
was no vibration. Common winds, 
not having power enough to move 
them, split, and went through them 
without a whistle. But when there 
came along great tempest-winds, and 
the forests rocked, and the heaven 
was black, and the air resounded, 
then these winds, with giant touch, 
swept through the wires, which began 
to ring, and roar, and pour out terrific 
melodies. So God stretches chords in 
the human soul, and ordinary in- 
fluences do not make them vibrate ; 
but now and then great tempests 
sweep through them, and men are 
conscious that tones are produced in 
them which could not have been pro- 
duced except by some such handling. 

419. Poor Contentment. — There is 
a sense in which a man, looking on 
the present in the light of the future, 
and taking his whole being into the 
account, may be contented with his 
lot ; that is Christian contentment. 
But I tell you, that if a man has 
come to that state in which he says, 
" I do not want to know any more, or 
do any more, or be any more," he is 
in a state in which he ought to be 
changed into a mummy ! Of all 
hideous things mummies are the most 
hideous ; and of mummies, those are 
the most hideous that are running 
about the streets and talking ! 

420. Patience is Self-Control. — Cour- 
age is brilliant, ready to meet and resist, 
to put on the whole armor of God, and 
go forth to battle and overcome ; or 
being set upon vehemently, to be able 
to stand a blow. There is something 
rather lustrous in that. There is a hero- 
ism in it. But patience — what is there 
in that ? Yet it is really the quality by 
which a man holds himself equal to 
his circumstances. It is that supreme 



quality by which a man reins in his 
forces, places himself willingly where 
God, by his providence, allots him ; 
where he has that consideration for 
himself, as a child of God and an heir 
of immortality, that no condition upon 
earth can daunt him. 

421. The Patience of the Dull. — 
Suppose a man should take a babe 
and lay it down to sleep by the side 
of a crocodile, in a place that was 
infested by mosquitoes and gnats and 
sand flies ; and suppose when the 
child, bitten by these insects and 
suffering with pain, waked up and 
began to fret and cry, the crocodile 
should say, " My dear child, what is 
the matter ? Why are you so irritable ? 
I do not feel anything. I can keep 
my patience." Many men are covered 
with thick shells, and are good na- 
tured because nothing hurts them. 
Such men ought not to be censors of 
those who suffer at every pore. 

422. Changing Moods and Powers. 
— Did you ever attempt to row a boat 
on the East River when the tide was 
one way, and you wanted to go the 
other? I lay an hour off the Navy 
Yard soon after I came to live here. 
I thought I was making good prog- 
ress ; but I noticed that there was a 
great similarity in the appearance of 
the vessels lying about me, and on 
looking at the shore I found that in 
an hour I had not advanced a foot. 

I have seen men do the same thing 
on streams, not of water, but of resolu- 
tions. Many a man works hard to 
keep good resolutions without making 
a step so long as the tide is against 
him. And blessed be God for the 
hour that changes the tide. I ran 
down from the Navy Yard very quick 
when the tide turned so as to be with 
me instead of against me. And 
blessed are those periods when that 
tide runs towards heaven which has 



EMOTIONAL QUALITIES 



loi 



been running towards hell, and has 
carried men far down with it. 

423. Man's Need of Restraint. — 
You may take the finest Messenger 
colt that ever lived, and he never will 
be valuable unless he goes into the 
trainer's hands. Pass by the yard. 
See him with the surcingle tight about 
him. See him with martingales on, 
and with his head brought down by 
them. See him with bit in mouth, 
and guiding-reins behind. See how 
fractious he is. He has lost his 
liberty ; but he is on the way to find 
it. He never would know what he is 
if it were not for that harness — for a 
harness is an instrument not for 
hindering an animal's strength, but 
for developing it. And as by break- 
ing you keep a colt whole, and have 
every part of him unwasted, not lost, 
so it is by being broken in, by having 
their wildness of nature restrained, 
that men come to their real selves. 

424. Just Anger. — A man that does 
not know how to be angry, does not 
know how to be good. A man that 
does not know how to be shaken to 
his heart's core with indignation over 
things evil, is either a fungus or a 
wicked man. " Abhor that which is 
evil" is the divine command, just as 
much as "Cleave to that which is 
good." High and gusty passions 
that sweep through the soul are some- 
times like fierce summer storms that 
cleanse the air, and give the earth re- 
freshment by strong winds and down- 
pelting rains. Men are better for 
knowing how to be angry, provided 
the sun does not go down on their 
wrath, and provided it is justified by 
the occasions of it. If a man hates 
meanness and dishonor, he may be 
angry at them ; if it is men's sins, and 
not their faults, not their foibles, not 
their unintentional offences, not their 
piques of his pride and vanity that 



make him angry. Soul-destroying 
wickednesses among men — these 
should excite your anger. I would 
that men were fretful less and angry 
more. 

425. The Passions. — When they 
were storing that great cavern of Hell 
Gate with explosive tubes for clearing 
away the rocky obstructions in the 
channel, there were to be three thou- 
sand handled by two hundred or a 
hundred and fifty men ; and they all 
knew that if any man dropped one the 
whole would explode in a moment and 
they would perish ; and with what 
care and circumspection did every 
man of them labor ! If it did not 
turn the hair of the superintendent 
gray it ought to have done so, to 
watch the work ! But skill and great 
care accomplished all safely. If men 
felt that they were bearing explosive 
materials within them, if they had a 
sense of the training that is needed in 
certain parts of their nature, and if 
they joined training to prayer, then 
they might hope to have some answer 
to their petitions when they prayed, 

426. Lustful Fires. — Many employ 
their time in fostering passions and 
malign desires, which are to turn 
their life into a volcanic region 
scorched and burned. 

427. The Torment of Revenge. — If 
Dante were here, and he wanted to 
go to hell, I think he would go down 
into hearts that were built large for 
love, but that are closed by the 
crater of revenge, where love has 
turned, not to hate, but to a kind of 
subtle torment. Right there you will 
find a gate which, if you open it, will 
disclose to you hell below. 

428. Training of Character. — When 
a steed is first brought into the ring to 
be broken, he is wild and fiery ; he 
snorts at the sight of the bridle and 
saddle ; he is restless under the rider ; 



102 



SOCIAL LIFE 



there is nothing at which he does not 
shy ; his gait is irregular : but patient, 
firm, dihgent training by and by 
subdues him. so that he becomes 
docile, and his original frantic efforts 
become nimbleness and fine action. 
He is not changed so that he has 
other than a quick, sensitive disposi- 
tion ; but his quickness and sensitive- 
ness are disciplined to such an extent 
that he is steady and easily manage- 
able. He is " broken," not in his na- 
ture, but in the way in which he 
carries that nature. You must learn 
how to direct the elements of your 
being aright, and then you must make 
your physical, intellectual, social and 
moral powers cooperate. 

429. Training Untractable Natures. 
— A hot, irritable nature may not be 
converted into an even and calm one, 
but a man who has a great deal of 
nerve, who is like a flame of fire, who 
is constitutionally quick and imperious, 
can teach his faculties to work in such 
a way as to make his quickness and 
imperiousness a_benefit, not a curse. 

430. Man's Faculties to be Regu- 
lated. — In the stalls of the human 
soul, in all the lower range of 
faculties, there is not one steed for 
which there is not harness or bridle, 
and which, being bitted and trained, 
a man cannot ride and drive. 

431. Formative Influences. — The 
most noisy and ostentatious influences 
of summer are not those which chiefly 
shape its destiny. It is the sum of 
small and even inconspicuous things, 
acting in gentle continuity, that gives 
tone and character to the year. Frosts, 
that in summer become dews ; dews, 
that in winter are transformed to 
frosts ; tiny mosses and silken grasses; 
the up-sucking of moisture by hidden 
and silent roots ; the fall of outworn 
leaves, and their conversion to mould ; 
the silent power of remote orbs, that 



sheet the earth with light, pierce it 
with heat, that move the tides, and 
swing the globe itself around its cir- 
cuit — these undemonstrative and mod- 
est influences — silent, precious, in- 
visible attractions — are the great 
workers of Nature. Nor is the 
analogy wanting in the soul of man. 
The influential agents which determine 
destiny are often so soft and subtle 
that the very touch is not felt, nor the 
presence discovered of things which 
change or fix the mind's moods, and, 
with constant recurrence, fashion the 
character. 

432. Self-Portraiture. — That motive 
which is all the time inspiring you to 
work is the chisel that is cutting out 
your portrait. The higher the motive, 
the finer becomes the sculpturing hand 
which is fashioning your features. If 
the motive is the highest, the linea- 
ments are being formed to represent 
all the beauty of divine nobility. 

433 . Self-Recognition. — At a friend's 
house lately, I saw what was appar- 
ently a little book lying on the table, 
and I took it up. On the outside was 
The Portrait of an Angel. On opening 
it. I found that it was a mirror. And 
O. what an angel I saw in it ! If a 
man takes the mirror of an ideal Chris- 
tian manhood and looks at himself in 
it, what he sees himself to be is not 
exactly his pattern of a man in Christ 
Jesus. 

434. Energy of Goodness. — A man 
may have a mild and languid con- 
science like an autumnal October day 
that just shines and ripens nothing ; 
but if he have combative energy it 
will give to his conscience an edge 
and a cutting power that will make it 
regent. A man may have a sweet 
good nature that is full of nothing but 
moonshine ; but if he is energetic the 
informing power underneath it may 
make his benevolence walk to and fro 



EMOTIONAL OUALITIES 



103 



up and down the earth in the midst of 
mercy and benefaction, like the efful- 
gent sun of June. 

435. Power of Intensity. — These 
higher moods are those in which one 
mind dominates another. Love and 
faith at white heat are irresistible. 
One reason why the Apostles had such 
power wherever they went was, that, 
having no fastidious taste or thought 
about the form or proportion of any- 
thing, they had this lunging power, 
and they were hot all over, all the 
time, and everywhere men caught fire 
at their sacred touch. 

We see this exemplified in* society. 
Hundreds of men, who are rich in 
learning, ponderous in mental equip- 
ment, ample in philosophical power, 
admirable in proportion, who are at a 
low degree of temperature, and who 
labor all their life, achieve but little. 
And you shall see right by the side of 
them men who have no comparison 
with them in native power — certainly 
not in culture — but who have sim- 
plicity, straightforwardness, and above 
all i7ite7isity, and who are eminent for 
their success in accomplishing results. 
It is the fervidness of their spirit. 

436. God, the Mover ; Man, the 
Actor. — If God inspires you, he in- 
spires you to use your faculties. He 
does not use your faculties for you ; he 
does not tell you what to do with 
them ; he wakes you up to use them 
for yourself ; and you are responsible 
for the character of the results which 
are produced by their use. And you 
are not to confound the impulse with 
the results to which that impulse leads 
you. Not every mill brings out good 
fabrics that has a good water-power 
turning the wheel, or a good engine 
carrying the machinery ; God supplies 
the motive power for the machinery, 
but you are the spinners and weavers. 
The pattern that comes out of the 



loom — the fabric — is yours. That 
which stimulates is Divine. 

437. Influence of Soul on Soul. — 
When, in the hour of battle, the leader 
fills his followers with an enthusiasm 
that seems like a secret fire, it is said 
that he infuses himself into them — and 
it is near enough to Hfe to be accepta- 
ble as a figure or as a mode of speech. 
What is it but this : that he has in him 
the power of piercing the souls of men 
with the enthusiasm which is in him- 
self, and developing in them what was 
there before, but what they had not 
the power to develop in themselves, 
or would not develop ? It was there, 
or he could not have developed it. 
An enthusiast has the power to excite 
enthusiasm. He excites it. The cre- 
ative force is in the mind itself, which 
was preadapted to all its own exigen- 
cies ; and all that the enthusiast does 
is to kindle the fire, the fuel of which 
was already prepared in your soul. 

438 . Universal Desire of Excitement. 
— Men are conscious that in their 
higher moods the faculties excite them 
deeply, and open up ranges of power, 
and create experiences which they 
would never have suspected, judging 
from the average experience of ordi- 
nary Hfe. Men seek this exhilaration. 
It may seem very strange to say that 
dissipation itself, and the revelries of 
life, wild and corrupt, are only blind 
and stupid reachings after this higher 
life ; but it is so. Men are conscious 
that there is more in them than is 
brought out by ordinary things ; and 
they are all the time seeking in a 
blind, and crude, and often mischiev- 
ous way, to touch that hidden inward 
power, and bring it out. They seek, 
it may be wrongly, to bring out the 
lower power in its inflammation, or 
they may seek to bring it out by 
wrong agencies. At any rate, they 
bring it out in unregulated ways. But 



104 



SOCIAL LIFE 



the strife alter it shows that there is in 
man this mysterious, hidden, inward 
power, greater than that which be- 
longs to common everyday life. This 
is the motive of the chase. This is 
the motive of war. 

439. Energizing Power of Excite- 
ment.— All men are conscious of the 
opening up in some of their faculties 
of great powers which do not belong 
to their ordinary exercises. For ex- 
ample, there are few of you who have 
not known what swell and energy 
there is in anger, and how much more 
every part of a man's nature seems to 
be intensified under its influence. A 
man in the ordinary drawl of a good- 
natured life seems half the time not a 
man ; but when he is roused up with 
indignation that touches him to the 
very bottom, he feels as though he 
had in himself the being of at least 
twenty men. Such is the energizing 
power of even so low a passion as 
anger. 

440. Climate and Brains. — Our cli- 
mate is stimulating. There is more 
oxygen in our air. It has some im- 
portance in this, that anything that 
gives acuteness, vivacity, spring, to 
the substance of the brain prepares it 
for education and larger intelligence. 
A dull, watery, sluggish brain may do 
for a Conservative ; but God never 
made them to be the fathers of prog- 
ress. They are very useful as brakes 
on the wheel down hill ; but they 
never would draw anything up hill. 

441. The Law of Feeling. — A pri- 
mary emotion will have an influence 
on the life as long as the exciting 
cause is present, and no longer ; but 
a feeling in the secondary form is dif- 
fused through life, and works in it 
perpetually. It is less pleasurable in 
the secondary state than in the pri- 
mary state, but it is ten thousand times 
more efficacious and useful. The law 



of feeling, then, is that it has two 
states, in the first of which it is a mere 
emotion, and in the second of which 
it harnesses itself as a motive power 
to a practical purpose and becomes 
an efficient laborer in daily life. 

442. Emotion in Action. — Here are 
in a great battle thousands of men 
wounded and scattered all over the 
field, and the calmest, the coolest, the 
most unfeeling men on the whole 
ground are the surgeons. Pale, cold 
are they. They are perfectly col- 
lected. Their voice does not tremble. 
They are decisive, and at times almost 
fierce. ' What is it? Do not they feel 
humanity ? Probably there is no man 
on the whole ground that feels it so 
much. But the intensity of their feel- 
ing transmutes itself into instant activ- 
ity. And the sign that they feel is 
what they are going through, or what 
they are doing. There is no room for 
more feeling. They change it into 
the better form in which right feeling 
should always seek to develop itself — 
action. 

443. Reaction of Feeling. — Dana 
relates of himself that when, after hav- 
ing been absent from home about 
three years, before the mast, on a 
perilous voyage, the vessel was near- 
ing his native land, he fed deHciously 
on the prospect of soon seeing those 
he loved ; but that when she came 
into port, and a boat was sent to take 
him to the shore, he could hardly pre- 
vail upon himself to go off and meet 
his friends. He had passed the acme 
of feeling, and was under the influence 
of that reaction, with its accompany- 
ing numbness, which comes after an 
excess of emotion or excitement. 

444. Happiness and Nerves. — Men 
of a phlegmatic temperament and who 
live in indolence, are measurably 
happy; they experience a low degree 
of enjoyment. But how much happi- 



MORAL QUALITIES 



105 



ness can belong to such a mood as 
they must be in — essentially torpid, 
with no resiliency ? If the tow is 
corded and strained tight, and then 
struck, it gives forth a tone ; but if 
you strike the uncorded tow as it lies 
in a heap, you get no sound from it. 
The nerves of some men are, as it 
were, flaccid, and they have no power 
to vibrate or respond to the touch. 
The human mind is in its best condi- 
tion for producing enjoyment when it 
is intense. 

3. Moral Qualities. 

445. Neither Good nor Bad. — Men 
are afraid of extremes. They think 
the " golden mean," as it is called, — 
and oftentimes it is mean enough, — is 
the safest. It may be, where the ques- 
tion is one of mere expediency, where 
no moral principle is involved. But 
where is it a mean that stands between 
right and wrong, where it is a mean 
that stands between honor and dis- 
honor, where it is a mean that stands 
between courage and cowardice, 
where it is a mean that stands be- 
tween selfishness and benevolence, 
where it is a mean that wants the 
benefits of both sides without the re- 
sponsibility of either, then it is a point 
of unmanhness. Zero begins halfway 
between right and wrong ; and when 
a man stands on zero in moral things, 
you may understand about where he 
is. He is in that point in which — 
changing the figure — God is pleased 
to say to him, " Because thou art 
lukewarm, and neither cold nor hot, I 
will spew thee out of my mouth." So 
much for a man's popularity in heaven 
who takes the "golden mean" be- 
tween moral extremes ! 

446. Duty and Destiny. — He who 
is false to present duty breaks a thread 
in the loom, and will find the flaw 
when he may have forgotten its cause. 



447. Good in Every Man. — If a tree 
bears wholesome fruit, we do not eat 
the entire tree ; we only eat the fruit. 
So it is with men : we do not eat 
them all. There are no perfect folks 
in this world ; or, if there are, I have 
never met them. Men's lives are to 
be taken in their best and highest 
form ; and there is something that is 
good in each one. 

448. Rough Outside, Sweet Inside. 
— There are people of all degrees and 
classes of goodness and badness, but 
nobody is perfect. And among these 
there is a very large class whose out- 
side is bad, and whose inside is good. 
Like chestnuts, they are hard to deal 
with, but are excellent when they are 
out of the burr. 

449. Moral Training. — Most men, 
I think, in respect to questions in life, 
are as I am in counting money. I 
count only for confusion. The first 
time going over, the amount is a hun- 
dred dollars ; and, to make it sure, I 
count again, when it is a hundred and 
ten ; and, as there must be an error 
somewhere, I count again, and it is 
ninety-five ; and the longer I count 
the more utterly uncertain I am wliat 
the sum is. So it is with men in refer- 
ence to their moral judgments of af- 
fairs. They go over, and over, and 
over them, because there is a funda- 
mental want of moral accuracy, aris- 
ing from a want of training and right 
habit in that regard. 

450. Regulation, not Destruction. — 
Imagine a dove saying, " I dislike 
this glossy green on my neck," and 
trymg to remove it. It may rub the 
feathers ofl", but they will speedily 
come green again. It cannot eradi- 
cate the color from its feathers. The 
sunflower will be yellow, however 
much it may prefer to be violet. 
Everything will have its own pecuHar 
form, its own peculiar color, its own 



io6 



SOCIAL LIFE 



peculiar juices, its own peculiar odors, 
and its own peculiar constitution. 
God meant that it should be so ; he 
watches to see that it is so ; he holds 
things down in their places, and you 
among them, and your faculties in 
you. He gives you liberty to control 
one faculty by another, but he never 
gives you liberty to rub out one figure. 
The problem you are to work out in 
life requires that you should use every- 
thing put into you. 

451. Variations, and Steadfast Pur- 
pose. — It is no small thing for a man 
to have a rule in his mind by which 
to judge every part of his life, even 
though every part of his life may not 
always conform to that rule. 

If you have stood by the pilot of a 
ship, and watched him as he steered 
it, you know that such is the build of 
the shio, such is its equipoise, and 
such is uie unequal motion given to it 
by the waves and winds, that no man 
can hold it exactly to its course. No 
sooner is it brought into steering line 
than it is carried to the right or to the 
left. One minute it is too far inland. 
The next minute it is too far in the op- 
posite direction. The pilot is obliged 
to be constantly turning the wheel to 
meet the various forces that oppose 
him. The steering of a ship is marked 
by a succession of imperceptible zig- 
zags ; a man's life certainly is, whether 
a ship's steering is or not; but where 
the voyage is as wide as the breast of 
the Atlantic, where it is the whole of 
our earthly existence, and where a 
man has a definite purpose which 
constitutes his steering-line, and he 
comes to that in the end, it amounts 
to a straight voyage. 

452. Mutual Judgments. — There are 
some men whose thinking powers are 
preponderant ; they think as easily 
as a bird flies: but when they would 
apply their thoughts to practical 



things, they are like birds that try to 
walk, and only hop, making little 
progress, and that with fitful awk- 
wardness. There are others that think 
very little, but feel a great deal. Their 
great hearts, filled with emotions, are 
like full reservoirs or swollen streams. 
Their life proceeds from feeling. 
There are still others that have not 
much power of thought nor of feeling, 
but great passional power. Then 
there are those who are characterized 
by great energy — who have rude, 
quartz-crushing, pile-driving natures. 
It is the supremest conceit for one to 
assume his own disposition and tem- 
perament as the measure of other 
men, judging their conduct, not by 
the influences which the actor felt, but 
by the motives which the critic would 
have felt. 

453. The " Personal Equation " in 
Moral Judgments. — You will take no- 
tice how careful men are in forming 
their beliefs on scientific subjects. 
, , . When a star in transit passes 
a given line, and a man records the 
time exactly of its striking the line, it 
will happen that a dull brain did not 
see it for a measurable period of time 
after a sensitive and quick brain. 
Some men are quicker, some men are 
slower, some intermediate ; and the 
astronomer is obliged to have a " per- 
sonal equation" of his own pecuUar- 
ities of quickness or slowness, accord- 
ing to rules that have been established, 
so that in making the additions or sub- 
tractions, he always takes it into ac- 
count as a part of his calculations. 

This is for the sake of physical ob- 
servations. Who ever thought of 
making a personal equation in the 
judgment of men on great moral ques- 
tions or questions of art ? Men go 
blundering into these great depart- 
ments, every man thinking he can un- 
derstand as well as every other man. 



MORAL QUALITIES 



107 



454. Moral Intuition. — Where any 
faculty exists in great strength, or 
where under particular excitement it is 
carried above the level of its ordinary 
unfolding, it becomes luminous in this 
sense — that it throws a light before re- 
flection upon the path of reflection. 
Before thought it guides thought, so 
that all the way through hfe we find 
that there is this intermingUng on the 
part of superior organizations or on 
the part of ordinary organizations in 
their superior moments — revelations 
made to them. Take the case of 
music. A man who has in him the 
genius of music, standing in the midst 
of an orchestra of one hundred per- 
formers, discerns discord — a half tone, 
or discord even less — and he not only 
sees it in the vast measure and move- 
ment of various instruments, and in 
the progress of the thought through 
sound he not only perceives it in- 
stantly, but he sees where it came 
from ; he knows the very instrument 
that produced it. /might stand there 
years, and never dream of it. . . . 
That which to a common man seems 
as if it was not very rude, to a sensi- 
tive and exquisitely loving nature is 
painful to the last degree. It is the 
higher intuition, the higher judgment 
of the finer and the larger faculties of 
the mind or in the larger organization, 
— it is out of these that come what we 
call intuitions, and in the lower forms 
they pervade society. It is from prac- 
tical experience and teaching when we 
are young, coming to a state of mind 
in which we can apply a principle to 
courses of conduct and moral intui- 
tions, the highest of all — it is from 
these sources that the intellect knows 
and teaches the emotion or conscience 
what is right and what is wrong. 

455. Measure of Achievement. — 
It is not right to measure a man who 
is far down in the scale of endowment 



and privilege by one who is far up in 
these regards. Every man must be 
measured by what he himself is. In 
the spring, I take a rose that seems to 
have lost almost all its vitality, and to 
be struggling for shoots ; and I carry 
it to Mr. Turner [Mr. B's Peekskill 
farmer], and say, "Give it a fair 
chance to grow." And he opens the 
ground, and gives it a generous quan- 
tity of rich earth, and it begins to 
throw out shoots, and it grows through 
the summer and reaches a height of 
six inches, and by autumn it is really 
blossoming. But suppose I should 
look down at this stunted rose, and 
then up at the large one, and say, 
"This is no rose at all, compared 
with that one which has grown nearly 
six feet, instead of six inches " ? You 
must measure those roses by what they 
were when they started, and by the 
chances which they had for growth, 
and not by what others have accom- 
plished under better conditions. 

456. Credit for Effort Rather than 
Result, — Here is a man who has been 
living all his life long just on the edge 
of swearing. Oaths have been perpet- 
ually hissing in him like steam re- 
pressed in a boiler ; and he has kept 
them under. There is a man who 
never thought of an oath. And I 
think, as God measures, that there is 
more credit due the man who did not 
swear when he wanted to all the time, 
and held in with pain and watching 
and self-exertion, than to the man who 
did not swear only because he did not 
want to. The former man has ex- 
pended more power to maintain an 
average decency than many men who 
stand far above him do to maintain 
their higher estates. I do not say that 
he is as good a specimen of manhood 
as they are ; I am now speaking of the 
quality of merit, of the kind of meas- 
ure, which is involved, and which de- 



io8 



SOCIAL LIFE 



pends upon us, and not upon what we 
have received — not upon our original 
endowment. 

457. Imperfection. — An orchestra 
that should play through the whole of 
])cethoven's Eighth Symphony and 
only chord five or six times from be- 
ginning to end, would hardly be con- 
sidered first-class performers. An oc- 
casional discord can be tolerated, but 
such an absence of concord that per- 
fect harmony is touched but five or six 
times in the playing of the whole piece, 
is intolerable. Now, our life touches 
concord only once in a while, and all 
the rest of the time it plays in dis- 
cord. 

458, Grades of Motive. — A water- 
fowl can walk on the land ; and it is a 
very good way to get along, as dis- 
tinguished from a stone's way of get- 
ting along — which is to stand still. 
And yet, when a duck's legs are in the 
water, they become the wings of the 
sea ; and how much more graceful a 
duck is in the water than on the land ! 
The swimming is no prejudice to the 
walking ; it is more graceful and 
potential than the walking. But when 
the hunter's cry is heard, and the bird 
drops the one and the other, and tries 
the upper ocean, and rises far above 
the fowler's aim and reach, and wings 
its way whithersoever it will, then fly- 
ing is better than either swimming or 
walking. And yet, flying is no preju- 
dice to swimming, as swimming is no 
prejudice to walking. 

Now, there will be a time when men 
will act by the highest development — 
moral intuition ; but that will not be to 
the prejudice of acting by the next 
lower — principle. And acting by 
principle is not to the prejudice of act- 
ing by the lowest guide — that of cus- 
toms or rules. They all cohere, or 
adapt themselves severally, in their 
functions, to the varying wants and 



conditions of human life and human 
development. 

459. Moral Sense Taught, not In- 
tuitive. — Homer's hero is Ulysses, the 
cunning, the slippery, the deceitful. 
That in that time was considered one 
of the qualities of a true manhood, 
but to-day no man should dare call 
himself a man who voluntarily or in- 
tentionally deceives anything or any- 
body. In Sparta it was a virtue to 
steal if you could do it without detec- 
tion — it was a kind of dexterity. And 
so the child is taught what is right and 
what is wrong, and, for the child, that 
is right which it is taught to be right, 
and that is wrong which it is taught is 
wrong, and there is no moral sense 
that is acting in his mind in the earlier 
periods and before reflection qualifies 
instruction. 

460. Physical Beauty and Moral 
Depravity. — What a painful contrast 
we often see where whatever can be 
done by the architect's hand, well 
paid, is done to rear the mansion, the 
palace ; where whatever taste can do 
is done to collect all books and all 
pictures ; where whatever the uphol- 
sterer can do is done to cover the floor 
with picture-carpets ; or where what- 
ever the artist can do, is done to the 
ceihng to make it, if possible, as beau- 
tiful as the floor of heaven ! But if the 
man who walks in the midst of all 
this treasure is himself selfish, carnal, 
grasping, hating, jealous, unlovely, 
the outward form of physical beauty 
stands in an eternal contrast to the 
walking homeliness of a man that has 
developed his animal life, but not the 
spiritual, efflorescent higher life. 

461. Artistic Goodness. — There is 
an esthetic element in the develop- 
ment of moral character which is to 
the ethical just what art is to fine 
physical development. I mean that 
in the development of the higher 



MORAL QUALITIES 



L09 



forms of human character there is the 
beauty of fineness, of harmony, of 
symmetry, of proportion, of that which, 
in manufacturing, we call finish. 

Give without grudging. It is not 
enough that you simply give. You 
must do it beautifully. Your gener- 
osity must not be clownish, but fine. 

When the cutler brings his goods to 
market, he may have the best of steel 
in the blade, and the best of horn in 
the handle, and every part may be 
riveted strongly ; but if the blade has 
not been poUshed ; and if there be no 
finishing work on the handle, he can- 
not sell his stock. It is just as good 
for practical purposes as though it 
were finished ; but people do not want 
it. They want their blades polished, 
and their handles finished ; and they 
are so used to having goods sand- 
papered and burnished, that they will 
not take them unless they are so. 
There must be art in them. This is 
carried so far that when articles are 
good for nothing, art is put on the out- 
side to make them seem good for 
something. And men buy things for 
the sake of their looks. The idea of 
perfection lies in the direction of the 
esthetic — and as much so in social 
and moral elements as in physical 
things. 

462, Moral Quality of Heroism. — 
The heroes of the world have been 
like early pictures. If you look at the 
pre-Raphaelite pictures in the galleries 
of Italy, and what I think to be more 
significant, the early Flemish and 
German pictures — for the German na- 
ture was more sincere and deep than 
the Italian nature ; the northern na- 
tions of Europe were more highly de- 
veloped morally than the southern — 
you will see that the artists were feeling 
after a beautiful thing. Although the 
drapery looks like tin for stiffness and 
angularity, and although the postures 



are some of them excessively stiff, 
and the grouping childish, you cannot 
stand before Van Eyck's pictures — I 
could not — without tears in your eyes. 
They were beautiful, in spite of all the 
infelicities of an early school of paint- 
ing. And so it has been with the 
heroes of every age of the world. Go 
back to those men whom nations have 
reverenced, and set aside the bad 
painting, and you will find that their 
characters turned on some moral 
quality, and that the nation was 
thrilled, and history was made radi- 
ant by it ; because the heart answers 
to every exhibition of moral excellence 
or moral truth. 

463. Superiority of the Moral Ele- 
ment. — In a civilized community, when 
all excitement is gone, when time has 
been given for men's feelings to settle, 
he rises to the top, he stands highest, 
who exhibits the most of the moral 
elements. 

In our own history, Aaron Burr was 
a keener thinker than George Wash- 
ington. He was a far more ingenious 
man, a far more active man ; and if 
he had been a moral man, and had 
maintained normal relations with him- 
self, with his fellow-men, and with the 
laws of rectitude, he would have been 
an abler man. Washington was a 
man of good sense, but he was not a 
man of genius in any direction except 
that of conscience. He was a man 
of singular equity, of great disinter- 
estedness, and of pure and upright in- 
tent. Sagacious he was, by the light 
which comes from integrity. He en- 
dured, having faith to believe that 
right was right, that right was safe, 
and that right in the end would pre- 
vail. That which made Washington 
the greatest hero of our Revolution- 
ary struggle, was the light of the 
moral element that was in him — not 
any intellectual genius which he pos- 



no 



SOCIAL LIFE 



sessed ; not any peculiar social endow- 
ments ; not any rare tact in adminis- 
tration, nor any remarkable executive 
power. And if you look back upon 
those names in our history that have 
best stood the test, you will find that 
they have been men who were fruitful 
in the highest moral elements. And 
as time goes on, those men who lack 
these elements sink lower and lower 
till they set below the horizon ; and 
those men who possess them rise 
higher and higher, till they reach the 
meridian, with undying splendor to 
shine upon history and the world. 

464. The Earth-View of Moral 
Truth. — I consider a mole's opinion of 
the structures and uses of my hya- 
cinths to be very much like most 
folks' notions of moral truth. The 
moles see the bottom and nothing 
else. Imagine a mole forming a 
philosophical theory of my bulbs. In 
mole's language, whatever that is, he 
would say : "A hyacinth is a vege- 
table creation put underground for 
the benefit of moles. It is round, of 
a sweetish taste, quite juicy, and 
wholesome for moles. It has been 
held by some moles that a hyacinth 
has an existence above ground, and 
speculatists have gone so far as to say 
that this root is only a kind of starting 
point, while the best part of the plant 
is above ground. But there is no evi- 
dence of that, and it is doubtless a 
vagary of the imagination." 

465. Taking Account of One's-Self. 
— The wise business man, with a com- 
plicated system of departments of 
business, keeps each department sep- 
arate, and then every year he knows 
whether that department is going 
back or forward, or is standing still. 
There is no business that has so many 
departments in it as a man's own 
nature ; and it is every Christian 
man's business to know whether, on 



the whole, he is gaining by training, 
by using, or whether he is stationary, 
or whether he is going back. The 
law of growth is not a permission, it is 
not optional ; it is a duty. 

466. Insubordinate Mind-Servants. 
— Suppose a man should neglect his 
business, and give unlimited power to 
his clerks, and they, in his counting- 
room, should go on signing papers, 
filling up checks, running him into 
debt, tying up his affairs, and he 
should know nothing about it ? You 
have not less than forty clerks ; and 
there is not a day in which one or an- 
other of them does not use pen and 
ink that carry judgment in God's day 
of reckoning. They are writing what 
they please. Many of them are con- 
fidential clerks. One is Pride ; an- 
other is Vanity ; another is Lust of 
Power ; another is Greed of Gain ; an- 
other is Self-indulgence. If they go 
on unrestrained, those clerks will 
break you, as sure as there is a God 
in heaven. Your eternal affairs are 
becoming involved, your spiritual in- 
terests are being hazarded, and you 
know nothing about it. 

467. Truthfulness. — Truth is the 
backbone of honor, of trustworthiness, 
of manhood itself. A man who does 
not care for the truth is no better than 
a jelly-fish. He has no stability ; no 
firmness ; no integrity ; no organizing 
substance. 

468. Steadfastness. — The anchor is 
useless to the ship in summer and in 
calm days : yet there comes, by and 
by, a time when the heaven is full of 
storms, and the sea is boisterous and 
cruel ; and then on casting out the 
grasping anchor to the bottom of the 
sea the chain holds, for there was not 
one flaw in it. One bad link in it and 
it would part, and the whole would go 
with a rush, and the ship would be 
destroyed. So men are built, link by 



MORAL QUALITIES 



111 



link, virtue by virtue, quality by qual- 
ity, and each of them is bound, as it 
were, inseparably to the other. As the 
old proverb has it, no chain is stronger 
than the weakest place in it. 

469. The Durable Character. — A 
ship, in a heavy gale, strains, and 
springs a leak, and founders. Men 
say, "The gale which caused that 
ship to founder began in the ship- 
yard. It would not have strained and 
sprung a leak if it had been properly 
built." Those timbers that were put 
in because they were cheaper, were 
elements of weakness that weakened 
the whole craft. The defects were 
covered up with paint and putty, as 
defects usually are ; and she looked as 
well, in the harbor she lay as well, 
and in a calm she went as well, as any 
other ship. But when the hurricane 
came down, the well-built craft went 
safely through the gale, while this one 
that was poorly built foundered. The 
trouble was not that this one was not 
handled as well as the other, but that 
she was not built as well. 

One man lays out his life-plans with 
moderation — that is, with relation to 
his own capacity ; with relation to 
what a man ought to want, ought to 
do, and ought to be ; with a keel of 
equity, and with ribs of truth and 
righteousness — and he is always build- 
ing as under the eye of the eternal 
Father. Another man, not meaning 
to do wrong, lays out his life-plans 
under the inspirations of overeager de- 
sire of greed : not of stealing and lying 
and dishonor, but of greed, of the 
immoderate use of his secular, worldly 
feelings. By and by comes the period 
of trial and suffering. Five, or ten, 
or twenty years may elapse before it 
comes ; but however remote that 
period may be, the weakness that in 
the one case was incorporated in the 
original plan, inheres in the structure, 



and it falls beneath the storm, while 
the other that was properly organized 
survives. 

470. Single Traits No Test of Char- 
acter. — A man dwells in his house in 
the plenitude of his wealth and refine- 
ment, and every child loves him ; all 
the servants admire him and are won 
to the greatest fidelity towards him ,• 
and his neighbors know how good he 
is — for they have experienced his 
bounty ; and yet when a burglar un- 
dertook to break into this man's house 
he was met by the owner with a pistol 
in his hand. But would it be right to 
take your idea of the character of that 
man from the burglar's opinion of him ? 
If you were to go to the prison and say 
to the burglar, " What do you think 
of him?" He would say, "He is a 
grim old devil ; you think well of him ; 
but you ought to see him as I saw him. 
If you had seen the fight between him 
and me the other night I guess you 
would have seen what the old hypocrite 
was." The man in his conflict with 
the burglar developed a trait in his 
character that had lain latent, and that 
might have lain latent all his life long. 
It was alternative, occasional, special ; 
and would it be right to draw the por- 
trait of his character from that single 
attribute and development in him.'' 
Would it not be right rather to judge 
of that man's character from all his 
relations, and from the sum of various 
traits, including his self-denial, his 
bounty, his helpfulness and his over- 
flowing kindness? 

471. Disproportionate Natures. — 
They have just launched their new- 
fangled battery at Charleston. It is 
said that it settles down seven feet 
on one side ; and it will settle seventeen 
before they have done with it ! The 
way they are attempting to fix it is by 
putting ballast on the side which is 
highest. So it is with men. One is sunk 



112 



SOCIAL LIFE 



down at the bow, and lifted up at the 
stern ; another is lopped over on one 
side, and keeled up on the other; 
another is top-heavy, the spars being 
too much for tlie hull ; and vice versa. 
Men are born with great disproportion. 
Some have immensity of physical 
force, and comparatively little brain 
force ; while others have an overmas- 
tering brain, and a slender body. 
Some have easy and powerful diges- 
tion, while others have almost none 
at all. Some have great caution, 
while others are entirely destitute of 
caution. Some have strong moral 
tendencies and no intellection, while 
others have large intellection and no 
moral tendencies. And who, looking 
at these facts as they are portrayed in 
life, does not see that men are born 
disproportioned, without symmetry ? 
Now the problem of Christianity is to 
equalize this disproportion. 

472. Varieties of Daring. — When 
one is strongly inspired by any emo- 
tion, affection, or sentiment, and fol- 
lows its leading without regard to con- 
sequences, he has the courage which 
belongs to that feeling. There are a 
great many feelings that exist in great 
power, and inspire men with daring. 
There is a generosity-courage ; there 
is a love-courage ; there is an honor- 
courage ; there is a courage of appro- 
bativeness ; there is a conscience-cour- 
age ; there are spiritual courages many. 
These not only differ as between them- 
selves, but they differ in different in- 
dividuals. There is many and many 
a man that would lay down his life 
without fear, and turn out his heart's 
blood as easy as he would turn water 
from a goblet, who would stammer 
and blush in giving adhesion to a sim- 
ple truth, or to a faith not believed by 
his associates. 

473. Physical and Mental or Moral 
Courage. — Courage is a noble trait. 



There is not another quality which has 
as much honor given to it in the world. 
When a man cheerfully puts to risk his 
life and limb, his being, for the 
achievement of a worthy end, the 
whole world instinctively admires him. 
Even his enemies praise him. There 
is no other one that is so universally 
esteemed as the truly courageous man. 

And yet, physical courage is only 
the lowest form of courage. It holds 
the same relation to the higher forms 
of courage, that physical qualities do 
to mental qualities. Hercules and 
Socrates were the two most courageous 
men in antiquity ; but one was a cour- 
ageous brute, and the other was a 
courageous man. And the courage 
of Socrates was as much nobler than 
the courage of Hercules as mind is no- 
bler than body. If it be noble to fol- 
low the lower impulses — and it is, 
where they lead in the right direction 
— how much more noble is it to dare 
to follow moral sentiments against 
danger! The lower impulse, where 
the body is put in peril, is noble — let 
us not take anything from that ; but 
how much nobler it is to dare to fol- 
low against risk the affections and 
higher feelings, wherever they may 
lead ! I would not discredit the lower 
form of courage ; nor would I super- 
sede it, even by the higher. The per- 
fect man has both bodily courage and 
mental courage. 

474. Men Judged by Their Own 
Standards. — A man who is a rollicking 
good fellow, good-natured and never 
troubled by conscience, says to his 
soul: " I have much laid up ; I have 
pulled down barns and built greater, 
and am ready to make merry ;" this 
man, living for the flesh and for the 
current time, is not censured by the 
community. He is permitted to go 
through society and is called a good 
fellow, a very nice fellow. And if he 



MORAL QUALITIES 



113 



does not die in debauch, but dies re- 
spectably, he has a respectable minis- 
ter to his funeral, who will beflower 
him all over with the graces and one 
thing and another. We embalm men 
when we bury them. But let a man 
who professes to walk with religious 
fervor and zeal do half these things, 
and one would think that a monster or 
dragon had infested the community. 
Men judge their fellows by the various 
standards which they themselves de- 
sire and set up for their own walk and 
conduct in life. So that a selfish man 
is not ordinarily condemned for selfish- 
ness. That is his measure. 

475. Importance of Basilar Ele- 
ments. — When the painter lays on the 
first and foundation colors, they are 
not to stand there crude and rude. 
He goes on with a thousand fine 
strokes, overlaying and overlaying 
them. What for? To wipe them 
out ? No. They are the foundation 
which is to make the final picture 
stand. They give body to it ; and, 
shining through, they give it a sort of 
subtle luster which the surface-colors 
alone could not give. And so it is in 
true manhood. We rise higher than 
the basilar elements ; but we never 
want them destroyed. We want the 
hidden power which they shoot up 
through. We want them to give en- 
ergy, and breadth, and color, and 
warmth to all the moral sentiments. 

476. Toughness of Fiber. — If you 
were to hear some men's experience, 
you would think that they grow as the 
white pine grows, with straight grain, 
and easily split — for I notice that all 
that grow easy split easy. But there 
are some that grow as the mahogany 
grows, with veneering knots, and all 
quirls and contortions of grain. That 
is the best timber of the forest which 
has the most knots. Everybody seeks 
it, because, being hard to grow, it is 



hard to wear out. And when knots 
have been sawn and polished, how 
beautiful they are ! 

477. Nobility Before Decoration. — 
The habit of acting from the highest 
considerations is that which makes a 
man noble. The recognition of nobil- 
ity may be conferred upon men, but 
not nobility itself. The king lays a 
sword on a man's shoulder and calls 
him a knight ; but he was a knight 
before he was knighted, or he would 
not have received the title. It was 
the heroic endurance, the death-defy- 
ing courage, the skill and coolness 
with which he achieved his notable 
deeds, that made him a knight. He 
was in himself royal and noble, and 
the king said to all men, " I see 
it," when he laid his sword on his 
shoulder. 

478. Achievement Demands Further 
Achievement. — We are like men that 
travel in mountainous countries. That 
which seems to be the topmost hill is 
no sooner ascended than there is seen 
beyond it one that is still higher ; and 
no sooner is that reached than, behold, 
another that is higher yet looms up in 
the distance. So life is one perpetual 
series of ascents ; and no man ever 
gets beyond the necessity of self- 
denial. He enters upon it, not only 
more frequently, and under more 
difficult circumstances, but more com- 
plexly. It is the condition of every- 
thing in life which is desirable, that it 
must come with effort. 

479. Three Tests of Character. — 
It is very hard to find a man of good 
sound timber that will stand the 
pressure of circumstances, that is 
without a flaw, that cannot be shaken, 
that will bear the stress oi opportuinty, 
iemptation, and impunHy. A man that 
can resist these three things and stand 
proved in truth and honesty is beyond 
all price. 



114 



SOCIAL LIFE 



480. Character-Building. — VVe read 
in fairy talcs of liow cities have been 
built in a single night ; and we 
imagine to ourselves how, while we 
sleep, ten million constructing fingers 
might carry up the walls, and sur- 
mount them with golden domes, and 
how whole cities might stand in the 
morning where the night before there 
was only a wilderness. But some- 
thing more strange than that would 
be, is actually going on in you. 
There is not a thought that is not 
striking a blow ; there is not an im- 
pulse that is not doing mason-work ; 
there is not a passion thrust this way 
or that way that is not a workman's 



thrust. The imagination in all direc- 
tions is building. Here is a great 
structure going up point by point, 
story by story, although you are not 
conscious of it. It is a building of 
character. It is a building that is to 
stand. And the word of inspiration 
warns you to take heed how you 
build it ; to see to it that you have a 
foundation that shall endure ; to 
make sure that you are building on 
it, not for the hour in which you live, 
but for that hour of revelation, that 
hour of testing, when that which 
hath been done shall be brought 
out, and you shall be seen just as 
you are. 



XII . JOT AND HAPPINESS 



481. Mirth. — Grim care, morose- 
ness, anxiety, — all this rust of life ought 
to be scoured off by the oil of mirth. 
It is better than emery. Every man 
ought to rub himself with it. 

482. Wit and Humor. — This world 
would be a great groaning machine if 
God had not sent humor to make its 
wheels run smooth, and sparkling wit 
by which to light a torch that should 
guide a thousand weary feet m right 
ways. 

483. Laughter. — No man can ex- 
plain to another why he laughs. 
There is is nothing more absurd than 
to ask a man " what there is funny in 
that story." Stories, like percussion 
bombs, must explode when they 
strike, or they are good for nothing. 
Stories that don't go off are poor 
stock. 

484. To Surmount Trouble. — Some 
steamers are built so that they do not 
rise over the wave; they jam their 
nose right into it, as if they would 
plough the ocean. The consequence 
is, their decks are always wet and 
everybody is always sick. There are 



other steamers that lift themselves to 
everything that comes, and ride over 
the waves, and are as sweet as a 
cradle. It is a great thing to teach 
men how to ride over trouble. 

485. The Sense of Humor. — Some 
men are so organized that as the eye 
of the feline tribe enlarges at night, 
and gathers every particle of light, 
and sees where others cannot see, in 
like manner, every element of wit and 
humor around them seems to be taken 
in by them, and they see it every- 
where, and air the time. Blessed are 
such men ! They have springs and 
cushions under them, while other men 
go in jolting ways, and find their life 
a series of bumps and grindings and 
attritions. 

485. Power of Cheerfulness. — A 
clieerful workman is worth a shilling 
a day more than one that is not cheer- 
ful. Men that have spring and elas- 
ticity of spirit make better members 
of society than men who have not, 
even in a lower sphere. And if you 
rise to a higher sphere, the same thing 
is true. There is not one duty that a 



JOY AND HAPPINESS 



115 



Christian is called to perform, there is 
not one thing that he is encouraged to 
undertake, there is not one victory 
that he is exhorted to achieve, in 
which he will not find more potency 
in joyful than in sad states of feeling. 
A mind-stroke kills the devil, often. 
You can give a flash of zeal, a stroke 
of faith, which will annihilate the force 
of a temptation. 

487. Mosaic Provision for Joy. — 
Wesley said that we had given our 
best songs and music to the devil, and 
that he thought it right to make re- 
prisals and get them back again. To 
a large extent the Church has lost its 
hold upon the imaginative and social 
elements of life, provision for which 
has been universally made in the con- 
stitution of men ; largely, religion has 
lost its hold upon them : but Moses, 
that wise old man of the desert, 
wrought them into his system; and 
not only at these festivals, but else- 
where, the people were instructed to 
observe them. The people were made 
happy, they were kept happy, and 
happiness was inculcated as a duty. 
. . . Among the Hebrews dancing 
was made a part of the religious cere- 
monial in such a sense that it was al- 
lied to religious feeling; and, more- 
over, religious feeling and the whole 
economy of religion were to produce 
amusement, gratification, happiness, 
over and above that which came from 
mere religious instruction, from gen- 
eral social intercourse, or home life. 

488. Outward Show not Inward 
Quality. — I have seen Cremona vio- 
lins, brown, black, split and splintered 
in fifty places, mended again and 
again, as homely to the eye as any- 
thing can possibly be, and yet worth a 
thousand dollars apiece — not on ac- 
count of what they are to look at, but 
on account of the capacity they have 
of producing extraordinary musical 



sounds. It is their intrinsic quality of 
tone that makes them so valuable. 
Then I have seen violins edged with 
silver, inlaid with gold, covered all 
over with mother of pearl, and per- 
fectly gorgeous to a baby's eyes, that 
had no quality or capacity for produc- 
ing real musical sounds, and were 
well-nigh worthless to a musician. So 
I have seen persons who have at- 
tempted to be happy by overlaying 
themselves with exterior adornments 
and pleasures, but who were like a 
violin without music in it, notwith- 
standing the splendor on the outside. 

489. Hunting Happiness. — When 
men set out to gain pleasures, they are 
like boys that run after butterflies. 
When you run after a butterfly, the 
wind that you make shoves him from 
you, and the faster you run the 
stronger is that wind; but, if you are 
going after something else, and a but- 
terfly passes near you, with sudden 
turn and down-stroke you can catch 
him. Now, if a man sets out to be 
happy, he may as well say, " Good- 
bye, satisfaction;" but if a man sets 
out to be a jtiati, and to do the things 
that are noble, and just, and right, 
and true, everywhere and under all 
circumstances, butterflies will follow 
him, and light on his head, and back, 
and all over him ! He will be happy 
that does not care about being happy. 
It is the rebound of other people's joy 
that makes your soul glad. 

490. Happiness from Within. — A 
child may put its hand on a harp that 
has been chorded and tuned, and 
music will come out of it; but a giant 
might smite against the body of an 
oak tree, and there would be no sound 
of music. There is no music in it. It 
is the quality of the thing struck that 
determines whether it is musical or 
not. The chords are in us, of no- 
where. If you have not the nature in 



ii6 



SOCIAL LIFE 



you which teiuls to llic prDtluctioii of 
happiness, all the influences which 
you can bring to bear will not make 
you happy; pleasure will bring no 
melody; riches will bring no deep- 
seated joy; and honors and aspirations 
will yield no happiness. 

491. Cheerless Soul-Culture. — Men 
take care of their souls very much as 
some farmers take care of their farms. 
They need something for their sheep, 
and they put in food for them ; they 
need something for their oxen, and 
they put in crops for them ; they need 
something for their pigs, and they 
raise corn for them ; but what do they 
do for their wives and children that 
love beauty ? They have a little 
flower-garden stuck away in some 
obscure spot where they cannot raise 
anything else, and where are a few 
marigolds and hollyhocks and other 
flowers struggling to blossom, and they 
call that a garden ! The farm is cov- 
ered with vigorous crops growing for 
the animals, but those things which 
minister to the love of beauty in their 
households are neglected. 

So religious people often have in 
the soul a little spot, somewhere hid 
away, in which there is some love of 
beauty, some cheerfulness, some hope, 
some elasticity ; but all the rest of 
their lives is characterized by fear and 
conscience and burden and toil and 
suffering and trouble. This is poor 
husbandry. It is feeding the bottom 
of your experience and leaving the top 
to starve. 

492. Joyless Religion. — " Rejoice 
in the Lord." This is Paul's estimate 
of Christian faith and Christian re- 
ligion. It is a joy-breeder. But this 
certainly has not been the result of 
observation. Multitudes of times 
children do not feel that religion is a 
joy-inspiring thing. Men of the world 
do not look to the church as being 



the organ and representation of the 
highest joy. 

The fault I find with persons in be- 
coming Christians is that they are so 
stingy themselves of their own joy, 
that they partake of so small a portion 
of the divine bounty which is pre- 
pared for them ; that they have a harp 
of a score and more of strings, and are 
drumming on one, and that this is not 
anything like a chord. Their harp 
strings are all slack ; and my in- 
junction and exhortation is, develop 
every faculty, bring it into its legiti- 
mate sphere, and thus bring music out 
of yourself and out of every part of 
yourself ; for a true Christian faith is 
the most joyful experience in the 
world. 

493. Happiness from Health, — 
Gardeners know that fumigations of 
tobacco are inadequate devices for 
getting rid of aphides that cluster on 
plants. The truest remedy for these 
things is to make the plant outgrow 
them. Give it nourishment so that 
it shall grow faster than they can take 
possession of it, and its growth will 
deliver it from all insect invasion. 
And there are ten thousand insect, 
pestiferous temptations, that creep in 
and trouble the soul, which can be 
most easily overcome by moral growth, 
— a thousand evils that do not touch a 
happy man, which cluster upon an un- 
happy man. 

494. Personality, — I remember that 
when I was yet in my college days, 
and had my first recognized sickness. 
Dr. Gridley came to see me, and 
sitting on the foot of my bed, told 
stories about my father and about his 
experiences, and got me into a frame 
of laughter and perspiration, and for- 
got to give me any medicine, and left 
the room, and I was nearly well. There 
be men who carry in themselves all 
the medicine that one's heart needs. 



JOY AND HAPPINESS 



117 



There are those who, coming into the 
sick-chamber, make a man sicker 
yet ; and there are those that, coming 
into the chamber of despondency, of 
care, of sadness, and fear, cause the 
temperature, one knows not why, to 
rise, and more light to come in at the 
window. 

495. The Soul's Longing for Joy. — 
As plants follow the light, and, when 
they sprout in dark cellars, point their 
pale cheek towards any single ray that 
chances to find its way in through 
some crevice, so the soul reaches 
towards that which is radiant and 
joyful. 

496. Happiness, Not Having but 
Being. — The power of being happy 
does not consist in what you have. 

" A man's life consisteth not in the 
abundance of the things which he 
possesseth." 

It depends upon how many chords 
there are in a man's heart which 
vibrate to the touch of joy ; and a man 
who is obese in a lower prosperous 
life is all the time covering up those 
noblest chords from which the highest 
happiness resounds ; while a man 
who lives for a noble end by noble 
motives, and keeps his conscience 
clear and clean, has touched in him, 
by airy hands, chords that give forth 
music such as is never known to the 
lower nature. 

497. Happiness Made Manifest. — 
Happiness is almost always like a 
generous hickory fire — a bank of coals 
with a considerable flame on the top 
of them. The coals are the hottest 
part and the best part of the fire, 
although they are not the most. We 
like the crackling of the wood, up- 
shooting a continuous flame ; that 
which aspires, and forms pictures in 
the chimney's throat, we call fire ; 
but, after all the heat comes from that 
which lies half covered by ashes. 



498. Pleasure. — Simple pleasures as 
contrasted with what they have had, 
and want to have, and mean to have, 
men count as no pleasures ; and yet 
they are thousands of times better 
than those violent pleasures which, 
like storms, cut up the ground, and 
destroy the crops, instead of nourish- 
ing them. It is dew which con- 
denses in mere drops, and falls imper- 
ceptibly on leaf and flower, and kisses 
the plant, and touches it with sweet 
nourishment ; it is rain, that comes 
through long days gently, little by 
little, as the earth can suck it up and 
use it — it is these that bring blessings ; 
whereas torrid storms bring ripping 
and rending and destruction. 

499. "Joy to the Lord." — I have 
a vivid recollection of what going 
to church was in my boyhood on 
Litchfield hill — especially in winter. 
It was a bleak place. The winds held 
jubilee. Tribes of winds repaired to 
that hill, not three times a year, but at 
all times of the year. And the church 
was in some respects a cheerless place. 
There was little or no provision for 
comfort or for decoration. Beauty 
was a thing scarcely thought of. It 
was not sought to promote joy. The 
plan of procedure was quite unlike 
that of the Hebrew commonwealth, 
which looked upon joy not simply as 
an accompaniment to religion, but as 
part and parcel of it. The Jews 
sanctified joy, and made it serve the 
Lord. 

500. Cheerfulness in Religfion. — 
Many persons suppose that a Christian 
is like a man who is looking in a dark 
pit all the time. They think that there 
must have been a mistake made in the 
creation of the mind. But God, when 
he, in infinite creative wisdom, looked 
round about and selected the traits for 
the human soul, salient, magnificent 
among them he put imagination, which 



ii8 



SOCIAL LIFE 



is in the niind what a diamond is upon 
the bosom, sparkhng and throwing its 
hght upon every side. And when he 
put imagination there, he meant that 
it should sparkle. And wit, with its 
concomitants of humor, mirth, and 
conviviahty in intellectual things, was 
likewise placed in the mind by Divine 
intention ; as was also hope. And 
these three traits — hope, wit, and im- 
agination — go to constitute what we 
call the buoyant temperament. 

Now, God wants the whole soul. If 
he had not wanted your wit, he would 
not have put it into you. If he had 
not wanted your imagination, he would 
not have put that into you. If he had 
wanted no stars in the firmament, no 
stars would have been there. If there 
is a flower in the world, God wants 
that flower. And if there is a trait in 
the human mind, he wants that trait. 
You may abuse it ; you may employ 
it in infelicitous ways ; but that has to 
do with the question of regulation and 
education. I aver that the perfect man 
is the man that has developed all the 
radiant, joy-breeding, joy-dispersing 
traits of his nature. It is a shame to let 
these traits go to the hands of the 
adversary, and exclude them from 
Christianity. 

501. Joys Awaiting Us. — There are 
joys which long to be ours. God sends 



thousands of truths, which come about 
us like birds seeking entrance ; but we 
are shut up to them, so they bring us 
nothing, but sit and sing a while on 
the roof, and then fly away. 

502. Happiness-Making. — A little 
attention makes some people happy. 
. . . There is many a man in this 
audience who could make happiness 
follow him as phosphorescent light 
follows a ship's wake on the sea : but 
most of you are so genteel that you do 
not think it would be proper for you to 
have to do with others unless you 
have been introduced ; and some of 
you say, "It is not for us to mix with 
the vulgar herd"; and others are 
timid and sensitive, and hesitate on 
that account. But there is not one of 
you that is not honored and beloved 
of God in the proportion in which you 
let your light shine so that other men 
may walk in the path which you make 
luminous. 

503. Worldly and Christian Joy. — 
Worldly joy is like the songs which 
peasants sing, full of melodies and 
sweet airs. Christian joy has its sweet 
airs too ; but they are augmented to 
harmonies, so that he who has it goes 
to heaven, not to the voice of a single 
flute, but to that of a whole band of 
instruments, discoursing wondrous 
music. 



Xni. WORK 



504. Industry. — We are born into 
a world which pays few premiums to 
lazy men. Providence seems to de- 
sign that no man shall gather who 
does not sow and tend. 

505. The Zeal of God's House. — 
Among the last things which that 
dear old man, my father, ever said in 
this lecture-room was on the subject 
of dying. It came up in the midst of 
some such conversation as we have 



had this evening. He rose, and stam- 
mering for lack of the memory of 
words, with great tenderness and 
reverence he said, " If God should 
ask me which I would rather do, die 
and go to heaven, or live my life over 
again " — [then he seemed seized with 
a qualm of conscience, as if he might 
be asserting his own will] ; "if he 
should tell me that it was right and 
proper, and that I might choose be- 



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119 



tween going to heaven, or beginning 
my work over again, I' d 'list in a 
minuted He was an old war-horse ; 
and after he was turned out to rest he 
never heard the trumpet or the drum 
that he did not want the saddle and 
bridle on, 

506. Work the Measure of Man. — 
Generally described, work may be 
said to be mental activity directed to 
the accomplishment of some definite 
object. When we speak of man, 
everything that belongs to him as a 
sentient creature must be carried back 
to his mind. A man is what his mind 
makes him. His body may be ranked 
as you rank the tools of a mechanic. 
The carpenter uses his saw, his ham- 
mer and his plane ; but he may do 
without them. Being tools they do 
not constitute a part of him. His 
hand and foot are only other tools. 
The physical man may be considered 
as only a sort of accidental append- 
age. It is the mind that makes and 
measures the man, by what it accom- 
plishes. Therefore work belongs to 
him, first, second and last, as an 
organization of mental nature. 

507. Genius Needs Industry. — Gen- 
ius needs industry as much as industry 
needs genius. The works of Bacon 
are not midsummer-night dreams, but, 
like coral islands, they have risen 
from the depths of truth, and formed 
their broad surfaces above the ocean 
by the minutest accretions of persever- 
ing labor. The conceptions of Michael 
Angelo's genius would have perished 
hke a night's fantasy, had not his in- 
dustry given them permanence. 

508. The Labors of Genius. — It is 
certainly true that men who are organ- 
ized highly work more easily and more 
fruitfully than others ; but it is not 
true that they do not have to work 
much. It is not true that men 
ever have results, even if they are 



men of genius, for which they do not 
labor. 

The eagle gets over the ground a 
great deal faster and easier than the 
ant ; but the ant gets over the ground. 
And the eagle, although he gets over 
more ground in a second than the ant 
does in an hour, does it by work of 
wing, employing muscular power, just 
as the ant does. So the highest na- 
tures, although they get over the 
ground much faster than the lower 
and more common natures, do it in the 
same way. Their power is greater, but 
it is under the same laws. And a man 
who is never so much a genius is not 
released from the responsibility of 
study, of practice, of education, and 
of applying means to ends. A man 
may be a genius in poetry ; but the 
most eminent poets have been the 
hardest students since the world be- 
gan. He may be a genius in military 
affairs ; but no man ever trained him- 
self more assiduously in military affairs 
than Caesar, or Napoleon, or Fred- 
erick, or any other of the greatest 
generals. It is work that furnishes the 
fulcrum by which genius labors. 

509. The Value of Training. — I re- 
member that in Indianapolis I had a 
house built. I wanted to economize 
in every way I could, and meant to 
paint it myself; and I did. I got 
along well enough until I came to the 
gable end, which was two and a half 
stories high. When I began to paint 
there I was so afraid that I should fall 
off from the platform that I nearly 
rubbed out with my vest what I put 
on with the brush ; but in the course of 
a week I got so used to climbing that 
I was as nimble as any painter in town. 

No man has learned a lesson who 
thinks of it at all as a lesson. No man 
has learned a trade who has to stop 
and say, " How ought I to guide my 
hand? " 



120 



SOCIAL LIFE 



510. Success Exacts Effort. — There 
is an impression tliat God gives some 
men the right to go through without 
paying toll. No, there are no "dead- 
heads" in Nature. Nobody rides there 
without paying. There are no men 
who run the gate, under any pretence, 
in Nature. What, not men of genius? 
No, not men of genius. What, not 
men of rare endowments? No, not 
men of rare endowments. Great men 
are great workers ; and men who pre- 
tend to know without working are im- 
postors, I do not care who they are. 

511. Great-Mindedness in Humble 
Callings. — There is no man who can- 
not bring great-mindedness to any 
calling in which he is embarked. It 
does not need that a man should be 
born a United States Senator ; for he 
that is on the shoemaker's bench may 
make himself a statesman [Henry 
Wilson, of Massachusetts]. Nor does 
it need that a man should be born a 
geologist ; for he that works in a stone 
quarry may make himself one of the 
most eminent of philosophers [Hugh 
Miller]. Where a man begins to work 
is where he begins ; but it does not fol- 
low that that is where he ends. The 
point of criticism is, that a man should 
suppose his trade to be the measure 
of what he is to be ; that he should 
look upon himself as shut up in it ; 
that he should admit that he must be 
no bigger than that trade. 

512. Indolence. — The mischief of 
indolence is not that it neglects the 
use of powers and the improvement of 
the opportunities of life, but that it 
breeds morbid conditions in every part 
of the soul. An indolent man is like 
an unoccupied dwelling. Scoundrels 
sometimes burrow in it. Thieves and 
evil characters make it their haunt ; 
or, if they do not, it is full of vermin. 
A house that is used does not breed 
moths half as fast as a house that. 



having the beginnings of them, stands 
empty. Woe be to them who take an 
old house, and carry their goods into 
it! A lazy man is an old house full 
of moths in every part. 

513. Quid Pro Quo. — This world 
is constructed upon the ground of the 
responsibility of men to work out for 
themselves whatever they obtain. It 
is not designed that men should have 
without giving an ecjuivalent. Life 
and strength are bought by the exer- 
tion of the appliances of men. Knowl- 
edge is not distilled as dew from the 
heavens. Men have to search for it 
as for hidden treasure. 

514. Labor, Among the Hebrews. — 
One of the proverbs of the old Jews 
was, "Whoever brings up a child 
without a trade brings him up to 
steal." However high a family was 
in social position, it was the habit of 
the Jews to teach every boy a trade, as 
he might see the day when it would be 
necessary for him to labor with his 
hands. ... It was sought to give 
every man the capacity to take care of 
himself, so that there should be no 
poor people in the land. So success- 
fully was this policy carried out that it 
has been said that the word beggar 
does not exist in the Hebrew tongue. 
Hear that, Ireland ! Hear that, Italy ! 
And all this sprang, not from climate 
or condition, but from the application 
of the Mosaic economy to the educa- 
tion of the people. 

515. The Law of Success. — As one 
who has read in the Arabian Nights of 
the man that fell down a precipice and 
found himself in a field covered with 
diamonds which he could have for 
the picking up ; so young men come 
to New York almost thinking it is a 
place where they will have only to fill 
their pockets and be rich. 

They are greatly mistaken. You 
take as large a population as that of 



WORK 



121 



New York, averaging it through the 
country, and you will find the law of 
productive industry to be the same in 
both city and country. You are con- 
centrated here. But according to the 
law of political economy the chances 
of success are the same. Luck, or 
chance, which is the basis of the fool's 
philosophy, has no more to do with 
permanent prosperity in these cities 
than anywhere else. 

516. Nothing for Nothing. — When 
I was put to school some of the most 
serious passages of my life were con- 
flicts between my teachct and myself 
as to whether I would acquire a knowl- 
edge of mathematics. I did, but not 
altogether automatically. And, in 
whatever department a man would 
seek knowledge, nature gives nothing 
for nothing. Nature insists upon it 
that there shall be a price paid for 
knowledge ; and whoever gains it pays 
for it with some weariness, with some 
abstention from things pleasanter for 
the time being, and with some mental 
and bodily application that requires 
intenseness of will. 

517. The Providence of Work. — 
" Behold the fowls of the air . . . 
your heavenly Father feedeth them." 
Well, what was the meaning of Christ ? 
Not, surely, what hes on the face of it, 
or at least what we have usually been 
accustomed to gather from the face of 
it. It is very true that the birds do not 
plow nor reap ; that they do not sow 
nor gather into barns : but it is per- 
fectly true that according to their or- 
ganization they do exert themselves 
for their food and drink. Do you sup- 
pose a bird, sitting on his nest, would 
have grain brought up to his bill, or 
would have water supplied to him ? 
No ; he has to go and get the grain. 
His store is uncultivated nature ; seeds, 
fruits and the flowing streams provide 
him with necessary food ; but the bird, 



according to his organization, and ac- 
cording to the laws that belong to bird 
life, is obliged to develop himself and 
exert himself to get it. When he does, 
he gets it. He finds God's provi- 
dence, and it is adapted to his own 
construction and need. 

518. The Providence of Work. — 
" Consider the lilies of the field," says 
Jesus. They do not reap nor plant ; 
and yet God clothes them with beauty. 
Very good ; the flower has to develop. 
There is not a single flower in all the 
wilderness, nor in all gardens, whether 
of the Orient or here on our continent, 
that does not work for a living. It 
sprouts from the seed. It sends down 
its roots, and every one of these roots 
is a purveyor hunting underground 
here, there and everywhere ; develop- 
ing, spreading out, sucking within and 
sucking without, dissolving the min- 
eral, pumping here for the juices that 
are to run up, and searching for water 
yonder. The willow finds moisture, 
even though you should not be able 
to. In darkness the long vine reaches 
out to the hght, seeks it, and at last 
finds it. Every plant that lives and 
comes to perfect plant-life is a worker, 
only on the plane to which he belongs 
with his limited development, and 
with his limited organization. It finds 
that God so orders the affairs of this 
world that when it works according to 
its nature it is provided for. The re- 
mark of Jesus is not dissuasion from 
active industry ; but God has so made 
this world, and he so governs it, that 
as birds and flowers in their way flour- 
ish, so man will flourish if he will 
adapt himself to his condition as birds 
and plants adapt themselves to theirs. 

519. Thoughts and Things. — A 
man has lived an indolent life. In 
youth he did not work because " Pa " 
was rich, and therefore he had a right 
to be a fool ! When he comes to be 



122 



SOCIAL LIFE 



twenty-five or thirty years of age liis 
father fails, and he finds himself with- 
out bread, and without habits of in- 
dustry. No one is so unhappily situ- 
ated as a man of refinement who has 
been brought up not to do anything. 
He knows how to think, but he does 
not know how to turn a thought into a 
thing. He knows how to reason, but 
he does not know how to produce. 
But he who has to earn his living 
must learn to convert thoughts into 
things, and change the invisible into 
the visible and practical. 

520. Power of the Weak, — Wine 
can do nothing compared with the 
raindrop in its simplicity. There is 
no power in it. Though it drench the 
earth with its red flood, nothing would 
grow the better therefore. But the 
simple rain, the very emblem of noth- 
ingness, apparently, or organized rain, 
the wingless snow, that can drop and 
fall, but cannot fly, why, what power 
is there in that? Nevertheless, the 
rain and the snow have their work, 
and they are among the mightiest 
agencies of God to produce vitality in 
the animal kingdom, and life through 
the vegetable kingdom in this world. 
What a fit figure it is of that invisible 
truth, the regency of (iod's morality, 
and of God's spirituality, as they are 
developed feebly and scatteringly 
among men ! 

521. High Destiny of Humble Work. 
— Imagine how Solomon's Temple was 
built, that went up in Jerusalem with- 
out sound of the hammer. In the 
umbrageous forest of old Lebanon, 
many and many a day-laborer worked, 
cleaving and sweating, cleaving and 
sweating, cleaving and sweating, in 
obscurity, and wondering of what con- 
sequence all his work could be. As 
they toiled, day after day, at the huge 
butt of some century-crowned cedar, 
with the rude instruments of their 



time, till at last it came down with a 
crash ; and as they topped off the 
limbs, and sawed up the vast trunk 
into various forms, they said to them- 
selves, " We are slaves, laboring here 
among the mountains unrewarded." 
And not far from them, in the gorge, 
were men that wrought in stone. In 
another place were workers in metal. 
Some did one thing, and some an- 
other ; but none knew the plan of the 
Temple, none knew what they wrought, 
till on a certain day, when they all 
trooped to Jerusalem. It was the day 
on which the dedication was to take 
place. And when they gathered 
there; when the hewer of wood, the 
carver of stone, and the worker in 
metal, from the various seclusions 
where they had wrought, each on his 
separate part, came together to see 
what had been made with all the dif- 
ferent parts, they saw in the columns, 
in the cornices, in the decorations, in 
all the paraphernaha of the wonderful 
Temple, the result of their toil. They 
stood entranced, and wondered that 
out of things so insignificant in the 
mountains, there should come such 
glory in Jerusalem. 

God has sent some to the cedar for- 
est, some to the stone quarry, some to 
the dark and dank places of this 
world, but he is collecting materials 
which will glow with untold splendor 
in the Temple that he is building for 
the New Jerusalem. 

522. Humble Helpers. — Now, when 
the cathedral is done, the little girl 
has a right to say, " I helped to build 
that! " You show me what you did. 
" I carried the dinner-pail to my fa- 
ther while he worked!" Well, she 
was a worker, too. 

523. Foundation-Work. — You will 
often see, in passing through the 
streets in New York, laborers down 
two stories below the surface of the 



WORK 



J 23 



ground, amid the dampness of the 
opened earth, or the ruins and cinders 
of conflagrations, digging, excavating, 
heaving up various masses that are to 
be carried away. When their part is 
done other laborers, in the midst of 
that damp and cold and unwholesome 
region, lay the foundations, and carry 
them up to the surface of the ground, 
and then abandon them and go to an- 
other like uncongenial sphere, leaving 
the work to be carried on by another 
set of men. The apostle in speaking 
of himself says that he laid foundations 
and other men built thereon. There 
are preachers of the Gospel who are 
like a man that works under ground 
on the foundation of a building till the 
sunlight kisses him, and then goes to 
another place to prosecute the same 
uncongenial work. There are men 
that are digging for the foundations, 
there are men that are laying up stone 
in damp and disagreeable places, 
there are underground, subterranean 
workmen, all about us. God does not 
forget them because you do not no- 
tice them. 

524. Good Work in Unseen Places. 
— It is related (I do not know with 
how much truth) that when Phidias 
was carving the statue of Diana to be 
placed on the Acropolis, he was work- 
ing at the backside of the head, and 
was bringing out with his chisel every 
filament of the hair, as far as it could 
be done in marble ; and it was said to 
him, " That figure is to go up a hun- 
dred feet, and is to stand with its back 
to the marble wall, and who will ever 
know what work you put there?" 
"But," replied he, "the gods will 
know;" and worked on. Do not 
hesitate to put your best work in the 
lowliest places ; for if others do not 
know it, God will. 

525. Fidelity to Duty. — If one has 
his garden on the street, how carefully 



he clears every bed of weeds ! With 
what care he trims his alleys and 
walks, and ties every drooping or 
weak-stemmed flower to its support ! 
How is everything presented so that 
it shall be comely in its aspect to men ! 
That is not wrong ; it is perfectly right 
to desire to please men by doing 
handsome and thorough work ; but if 
a man is fit to meddle with flowers he 
would do as much for every one of 
them if there were not another human 
being on the face of the earth, as he 
would if he knew that they would be 
gazed upon by hundreds of eyes, from 
the love he has for his work, and from 
his sense of the fitness of faithfulness 
and beauty to the task that he has in 
hand. 

526. Seemingly Unfruitful Work. — 
" My word shall not return unto me 
void, but it shall accomplish that 
which I please, and it shall prosper in 
the thing whereto I sent it." This 
gives, or ought to give, I think, a 
great deal of comfort to men that are 
working in hard places, in frontier 
settlements, in missions, in new places. 
It would seem as though the work of 
myriads of men was really squandered. 
They seem to be sowing seed, not 
upon the Nile, to find it again abun- 
dantly, but in mid-ocean, where it 
sinks, and rots, and comes to nothing. 
But the word of the Lord has a vitality 
that will not be extinguished. 

527. Obscure Work. — The bud 
that is breaking to-day you could 
take between your thumb and finger, 
but let it grow this summer, and then 
see what the bud is when it bears 
branches, and those branches bear 
other branches ! And yet these are 
all contained in the little bud ! Now, 
all the good that we do in this world 
is a bud in the garden of the Lord, 
which will in the future grow and 
spread and bear abundant fruit, and 



1^4 



SOCIAL LIFE 



yield grateful fr.igr.ince. Because you 
are working in obscure places, and do 
not see the results of your labor, do not 
suppose that your life is thrown away. 

528. Patient Labor. — There are 
ministers whose shoes' latchets I am 
not worthy to unloose — men who 
royally give their lives with patience 
and grandeur, in obscurity, and with- 
out the remuneration either of praise 
or present prosperity ; and who die 
sadly, saying, " It seems as though 
my life had been in vain." Oh, faint 
heart ! God will show you another 
picture when you stand in Zion and 
before him. Your life has not been 
in vain. God is covering in the various 
seeds that you have sown, and water- 
ing them with your tears, and there 
will be a precious harvest even on 
earth, while in heaven you will come 
with your bosom full of sheaves. 

529. Pleasure in Homely Toil. — Let 
a man adopt his business, and identify 
it with his life, and cover it with pleas- 
ant associations. For God has given 
us imagination, not alone to make 
some men poets, but to enable all men 
to beautify homely things. Heart- 
varnish will cover up innumerable 
evils and defects. Look at the good 
things. Accept your lot as a man 
does a piece of rugged ground, and 
begin to get out the rocks and roots, 
to deepen and mellow the soil, to en- 
rich and plant it. There is something 
in the most forbidding vocation 
around which a man may twine pleas- 
ant fancies, out of which he may de- 
velop an honest pride. 

530. Indolence a Corrupter. — Houses 
that are given over to impure air and 
mould and dust, will fall to pieces 
faster than houses that are used. And 
so it is with the human mind. There 
is no way in which it can be deterio- 
rated faster, or brought into morbid 
conditions sooner, than by indolence. 



531. Work Makes Possible Better 
Work. — No man is more conscious 
than I am of the imperfections of my 
work. But the soil on my farm at 
Peekskill, that results from the de- 
struction of infinite things that hitherto 
had existence, is still grinding them 
up, and all my plants live on the death 
of something else. My little services 
will be ground up to make soil for 
somebody else who will see better 
things and better fruits than I have 
seen. 

532. The Laborer and the Machine. 
— Every machine, although when first 
invented it seems to supersede the la- 
borer, has the effect to raise him one 
step higher. Every time an iron 
muscle is invented, it gives emanci- 
pation to a human muscle. When- 
ever you enslave a machine that you 
have a right to hold in bondage, you 
set free ten thousand slaves that you 
have no right to hold in bondage. 

533. The Cloud of Witnesses. — In 
our dusty modern times, in our hard 
materialism, we have swept out of our 
sky pretty much everything that we 
cannot see. We believe in telescopes, 
and in everything that the telescope 
believes in, but in nothing else. 

The Apostle Paul had a wonderfully 
populous heaven above his head. All 
the hosts of God, to his thinking, 
were at work. He believed that the 
ransomed did not go into everlasting 
indolence and call it rest. He be- 
lieved that the heaven was thronged 
with spirit-workers, and that they had 
sympathy with the work ; that they 
liked it not only, but were commis- 
sioned to help perform it ; and that 
time, and all the cope, were filled full 
of God, and God's workers. And he 
felt that he was ever working in the 
midst of this great and royal company, 
never unattended, never alone. And 
when he was upon the sea, or in the 



BUSINESS ACTIVITY 



125 



wilderness, or in the persecuting city, 
more were they that were for him than 
they that were against him. All the 
way through he worked with a mag- 
nificent sense of companionship. 

534. " Thou Shalt not go Over." — 
Moses, in being withheld from the 
promised land, is the prototype, the 
representative, of those noble men in 
every age who have wrought all their 
life long to pave the way for the suc- 
cess of those that came after them — of 
the men that laid right foundations ; 
as Luther, who died without seeing 
the results of his labor ; of men who 
perished on the scaffold to give liberty 
of thought to their fellow-men, dying 
without beholding the change ; of 
missionaries who planted the seeds of 
civilization and religion, but reaped 
none of the fruits of those seeds ; of 
inventors who made valuable discover- 
ies, and died poor that others might 
take what they had accomplished and 
carry it out to success. The victory 



of one man is founded on the defeat 
of a predecessor, time and time again, 
in this life. 

535. Immortality of Spiritual Labor. 
— The things which we do here perish 
in the doing, almost. When we write 
our names in time, it is as when men 
write their name upon the sand. The 
ocean is at it almost before they leave 
it. The waves roll over it and soon 
obliterate it. Such is fame in this 
world. The world is too full to re- 
member everybody. Almost every- 
body must be forgotten. Only here 
and there are the names of men per- 
petuated, and generally they are men 
who do not expect it. The work which 
will be remembered is that which is 
registered above. You must strike 
clear through beyond the physical, 
you must make an impression on the 
living hearts, the palpitating souls, of 
men. And to do this, devote your 
whole self — your body, your talent, 
your property. 



XIF. BUSINESS ACTIVITY 



536. Duty of Activity. — No man 
has a right to be a puddle. Every 
man is bound to have a life that 
flows, and cleanses itself by its own 
activity. 

537. Tasks and Time. — The hus- 
bandman says, " If my ground does 
not receive the seed early in the 
spring, I shall have no harvests in the 
autumn. I know the measure of the 
summer, and I must sow and labor 
accordingly." 

And the spirit of the New Testament 
in its economic exhortations is this : 
Life is given to man for certain pur- 
poses. These must be accomplished 
within a given bound. It is important, 
therefore, for one to keep constantly 
before him — or so constantly as may 
be needful — the fact that life does not 



go on forever, and that we must from 
day to day measure our tasks and ac- 
complishments by the time that is being 
expended, or that has been expended, 
or that remains for expenditure. 

538. False Ideals. — We are like 
men who go by their watches, but 
never set their watches by any regu- 
lator. We are continually regulating 
our lives by standards so false that 
they amount to no regulators at all. 

539. The Market and the Church. — 
Trinity church, looking down Wall 
Street, repeats the shining letters of 
the ten commandments cut in gold ; 
but what do the exchangers care ? 
Wall Street is more than a match for 
the stone steeple that points heaven- 
ward before them. They never look 
higher than the clock ; and three 



126 



SOCIAL LIFE 



o'clock is more important to them than 
the judgment day ! 

540. Difficulty of Living Aright. — 
It is a small thing for that fool to walk 
across a cable with the roar of Niagara 
under him, carrying some booby like 
himself on his back, though ten thou- 
sand other fools go to gape and stare 
at liim. But for a man to walk across 
the thread of daily life, carrying, not 
another fool, but a soul with immor- 
tality in every faculty, potent, wonder- 
ful in scope and power and suscepti- 
bility, so as to keep it in balance, is 
not a small thing. 

541. Man's Ineptness. — Hardly any- 
thing that men have ever done in this 
world that was worth remaining has 
been done at once. Here has been 
the garden ; and here has been the 
gate ; and men wanting to get in have 
begun just at one side, and have 
butted their heads against every single 
picket all around the enclosure until 
they got back to the gate again ; and 
then they stumbled in by accident, 
after every conceivable effort, and 
happened to hit the golden mean, and 
called it a "discovery." 

542. The Law of Value. — The foun- 
dation of all value is not what a thing 
cost in making it, but what is inherent 
in it of thought and skill. The gross 
things everybody can produce with 
very little thought, and they are the 
cheapest. The things which cannot 
be developed except by experimental 
education bring a higher price in so- 
ciety, because they have more of a 
man in them. All the way through it 
follows, not any notion of the time and 
the labor that is required to produce it, 
but this law — What part of the man 
was used in producing it? And to 
what part of a man is such property 
addressed? If, as in many theories 
among the socialistic tendencies of the 
day, it is the time and labor of pro- 



ducing the thing, then the blundering 
workman ought to have the highest 
wages, because it takes him a good 
deal longer to do it, and he has to put 
in more work ; but it is not that. It is 
the quantity and quality of brain that 
has been mixed with matter that de- 
termines what property is, and what 
its relative value. Though this law is 
constantly interfered with, as all laws 
are, by confusions and misunderstand- 
ings in the application of it, it is fun- 
damental. 

543. Ill-Gotten Gains. — Do not be 
led astray by any appearance. If 
wicked men prosper, do not give up 
your belief that morality is safer than 
wickedness. If men who are abso- 
lutely rotten shine by the phosphores- 
cence of decay, and dazzle your eyes, 
remember that their feet shall slide. I 
am just as sure that ill-gotten gains 
will destroy the getter, and that im- 
morality inflated into prosperity will 
by and by collapse like an over-blown 
bladder, as I am of my existence. 

544. Goodness to be Active. — No 
man ever will be a better man by se- 
clusion, or a worse man by engaging 
actively and enthusiastically in the 
right things of human life. As stran- 
gers and pilgrims would pass through 
a plague-district, not stopping, if they 
could avoid it, but hastening on, and 
taking care to touch no infected thing; 
so some would pass through this life. 
But no man is appointed to pass 
through this life as if it were plague- 
stricken and infectious. And any 
man that undertakes to go through 
the world acting on the principle that 
it is a sin, on the whole, to have much 
to do with the secular vocations and 
duties of life, not only will have in- 
finite troubles and inconsistencies in 
his own conduct, but will not under- 
stand the first letter of the spirit of en- 
lightened Christianity. 



BUSINESS ACTIVITY 



127 



545. Spiritual Value of Secularities. 
— The outward life is to the inward 
very much what the chaff is to the 
wheat. When the wheat is growing, 
the chaff is a bosom full of milk from 
which the little baby kernels suck their 
food; but when wheat is grown, the 
chaff dries up because its function is 
gone. And so the husk of corn — that 
stateliest grain that grows on the face 
of the globe — all through July and 
August is the provider of the food on 
which the kernels live, but when the 
corn is ripe, the husk is no longer of 
any use. And outside business in life, 
looked at in connection with the final 
results of Christian character, may 
seem very poor — it may be regarded 
as like chaff and husks; but as in the 
order of nature chaff and husks feed 
the grain, so in the order of God's 
moral providence the outside life helps 
the inside life. 

545. Misuse of This World. — If a 
man were to take a watch, and try to 
use it as a compass, to steer a ship by, 
he would say, " How unsatisfying this 
watch is ! " Yes, to steer a ship by, 
but not to tell the time by. And when 
a man uses this world for things that 
it was not meant to be used for, it is 
an unsatisfying world ; but when a 
man uses it for the things that it was 
meant to be used for, it is a satisfying 
world, — it is a glorious world. It is a 
very good world for the purposes for 
which it was built; and that is all any- 
thing is good for. 

547. Seclusion not Religion. — When 
God wanted sponges and oysters, he 
made them, and put one on a rock, 
and the other in the mud. When he 
made man, he did not make him to be 
a sponge or an oyster; he made him 
with feet, and hands, and head, and 
heart, and vital blood, and a place to 
use them, and said to him, "Go, 
work ! " And the man that does not 



go and work is not a man in the end; 
while the man that puts the vigor and 
enthusiasm which God inspires into 
the life that now is, becomes a man 
indeed. 

548. Quality in Activity. — A fly is 
more active than a bee. It is amaz- 
ing how active the fly is. To look at 
him, you would think him a master 
mechanic. He buzzes all summer 
long. And yet he is not worth his 
keeping. The bee buzzes too, but his 
buzzing means something. He pro- 
duces much and eats little. The fly 
produces nothing and eats much. 
There may be an activity which, 
though it has few results, is more ef- 
fective than an activity that has many. 
And a nature may work out few ef- 
fects, and yet each one of these may 
be so clothed with high moral feelings 
as to exceed in value more numerous 
results that are not thus clothed. 

549. Life a March. — Men move 
and march, and we must keep step, 
and forever move and march. We 
are strangers and pilgrims. We are 
not settled. We never shall be, in 
this world. Nothing is finished here. 
Every step is in preparation for the 
next. The whole of this Hfe is one 
grand march towards hfe indeed, and 
life in earnest. 

550. Shirking the Call of Duty. — 
A piece of iron that refuses the fire 
will remain iron and 'useless. To the 
iron that refuses the anvil is refused 
all function ; iron that will not be 
familiar with the grindstone will never 
have a cutting edge ; and men that 
refuse duty, courage, enterprise, for 
fear that they shall lose pleasures of 
safety and security and seclusion, are 
born animals, and animals they die. 

551. Low Grade of the Inactive 
Life. — A savage floats down life like a 
leaf on a stream. Whatever stream 
is under him determines which way 



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he shall go. An African or Hottentot 
likes his own indolent sensations, 
organizes nothing, plans nothing, ad- 
ministers nothing, lays up nothing, 
and lives with rare simplicity — an 
everlasting proof, against all foolish 
philosophers, that simplicity is the 
lowest possible condition of human life, 
but one step above the brute, while the 
dignity, the purity, the nobleness of 
manhood lie in the other direction. 

552. Happiness in Achievement. — 
Our happiness is organic, and de- 
pends upon conditions of activity : not 
a mere aimless moving, but coherent, 
organized, intelligent activity ; not 
such activity as leads the intolerable 
fly in the days of summer to buzz 
with amazing appearance of doing, 
and yet doing nothing, nor that kind 
of incessant pottering which springs 
from no motive and accomplishes 
nothing ; but that activity which is an 
application of lawful means to proper 
ends, such as builds the beaver's 
dam. Beginning at the lower ranges 
of happiness, a man will be happy in 
the proportion in which he achieves, 
or hopes to achieve. 

553. Blessedness of Work. — Blessed 
be the man whose work drives him. 
Something must drive men ; and if it 
is wholesome industry, they have no 
time for a thousand torments and 
temptations which they would other- 
wise have. 

A ship that has headway steers 
easily ; but while it lies drifting in the 
tide you cannot steer it at all. It 
swings back and forth, and you have 
no control of it. First the stern is 
"on," then the bow, and then the 
broadside. And so it is with idle 
men. A man that has nothing to do 
is drifting and whirling around, and is 
liable to go on this mud-bank, or on 
that sand-shoal, or what not. He 
cannot manage himself. 



554. " Fervent in Spirit." — Fer- 
vency is entirely reconcilable with the 
most industrious and enterprising 
business life ; but it is more than 
enterprise and industry. Much is re- 
quired of a man of which he is not 
capable when his feelings are cold. 
You cannot weld together two pieces 
of iron unless they are hot ; but when 
they are at a white heat you may 
weld them firmly. Many elements 
that will not dissolve in cold water 
will in hot water. There are many 
things that you can do at a heat that 
you cannot do in coldness. There 
are many things that you cannot un- 
derstand in a sluggish cold state 
which you can understand in a state 
of warmth and excitement. There 
are many things that a man cannot 
believe or do except when his soul is 
roused up and his imagination is 
flashing, and he is fervent in every 
part of his being. In the most fervent 
life things become easy, and they also 
become comprehensible. 

555. Activity Outruns Trouble. — In 
riding, it is sometimes the case that 
you go just slow enough to carry the 
dust with you, and so move in your 
own dirt. It is exactly so on the 
great road of life. Men go just fast 
enough to keep their cares and 
troubles along with them ; while, if 
they would drive a little faster, their 
dust would roll far behind them, and 
they would keep themselves clean. 
It is good to be active erfough to leave 
behind you the temptations by which 
you are surrounded. 

556. Business Unfavorable to Medi- 
tation. — Astronomers will tell you that 
it is very difficult to establish an ob- 
servatory in a great city. Why ? 
Because the thunder of the vehicles 
upon the pavements is such that there 
are oscillations going on all the time, 
slight trembles, so that you cannot 



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129 



measure with absolute accuracy. 
Thus it is when men are so whirled in 
business that they cannot make clear 
and critical observations of things that 
require calmness of heart and of 
mind. 

557. Partnership with God. — You 
are to be a scholar, a professor in sci- 
ence, a statesman, a lawyer, a physi- 
cian, a merchant, an inventor, a hus- 
bandman : no matter what the things 
are, you select your business in life ; 
but is there any partnership between 
you and God in your business ? Hav- 
ing selected these things, do you hold 
your methods of maintaining your life 
and character among men with a dis- 
tinct understanding with yourself that 
the way pointed out by the providence 
of God, by which you can become a 
better man yourself and rich towards 
God, is developing in yourself the 
divine qualities ? 

558. The Time for Patience. — A 
man has a large business. He has 
been prospered. A bad debt comes 
in. Others come in, here and there. 
There have been indorsements which 
he knew nothing about. He is threat- 
ened with bankruptcy. He rises up 
with giant strength, and lays grip on 
his affairs, determined to straighten 
them out. But the knot is tied so 
hard that neither teeth nor fingers can 
unde it, and every struggle ties it 
tighter. He fights manfully the battle 
from month to month, and comes 
nearer and nearer defeat in bank- 
ruptcy. And what with the feverish 
excitements of the day and his restless 
feelings by night ; what with the 
wounding of his pride, the damaging 
of his self-interest, and the disap- 
pointment of his hopes, he is sick at 
heart, and is suffering extreme an- 
guish. And if you go to him and say, 
" My brother, let patience have its 
perfect work," he says, "Oh, yes! it 



is very well for you who do not suffer 
to tell me to be patient. I wish you 
had to go through what I have gone 
through during the last six months. I 
think that then you would know what 
patience means." Nevertheless, the 
very best thing in this world for that 
man is patience, and the best thing that 
you can say to him is, " Let patience 
have its perfect work." And what 
will be its perfect work ? When that 
man can look bankruptcy in the face, 
and look God in the face, and say, 
"Thy will be done," then patience 
will have had its perfect work in him. 

559. Money : the Heart : the Brain. 
— It used to be raised as an objection 
against revivals of religion that they 
set men crazy ; that religion addled 
their heads. Ah! Ten men go crazy 
after money, where one man goes 
crazy in religious excitement. And 
yet nothing is said in the papers about 
that. There are many men belonging 
to business circles in New York who 
" step out." And what is the matter? 
"Softening of the brain." Harden- 
ing of the heart is very apt to end in 
softening of the brain. 

5 60 . Generous Dread of Bankruptcy. 
— When a man falls in a community, 
it is seldom that he goes down alone. 
He stands like a huge tree in a forest. 
Vines have crept up upon him, and 
other trees that stand near have inter- 
locked their branches with his, so that 
if he falls he will tear branches from 
some, and overturn and crush others. 
It is this carrying down of others that 
makes many noble-hearted men dread 
bankruptcy more than anything else. 
I suppose that men never put forth in 
any situation in life more heroic and 
more prodigious efforts than under such 
calamities and pressures. The history 
of them will never be written. The 
best histories never are written. The 
greatest heroes of the battlefield do not 



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equal in heroism, I believe, men that 
stand in New York to-day. The self- 
denials, the disinterested thoughts, the 
feelings of exquisite tenderness, of the 
street, and the store, are not known 
in this world. God is witness of them, 
and only God. 

561. Manliness in Bankruptcy. — A 
man that is bankrupt when his prop- 
erty goes has not been a man. To be 
a true man, surrounded with true 
riches, one should be able to say : " I 
am richer inside than laniouiside." 
There is many and many a man who, 
like an athlete, does not go into the 
arena for high conflict until he has 
stripped himself of all encumbering 
clothes, and stands in his nakedness, 
that every muscle may have free play 
in his conflict with some adversary. 
There are men that never seem so 
noble and strong as when God has 
stripped them of all their possessions, 
and left nothing but themselves. The 
grandest thing there is this side of the 
throne of God is a man. 

562. Evil for the Sake of Good. — 
You know that the devil spins silk as 
well as hemp or flax ; and when he 
wants to catch a trout that will not 
bite where it can see the line, he spins 
a line so small that it cannot be seen, 
and puts the bait upon it, and the fish 
is caught. And if there is ever an in- 
visible line, with bait at the end of it. 
and with the devil at the end of the 
rod, it is when a man is going to make 
money badly for the sake of using it to 
do good with. If there is ever a time 
when Satan laughs, and says, " I have 
caught a gudgeon ! " it is then. 

563. Moral Principle in Affairs. — 
When night is on the deep, when the 
headlands are obscured by the dark- 
ness, and when storm is in the air, 
that man who undertakes to steer by 
looking over the side of the ship, over 
the bow, or over the stern, or by look- 



ing at the clouds or his own fears, is a 
fool. There is a silent needle in the 
binnacle, which points like the finger 
of God, telling the mariner which way 
to steer, and enabling him to outride 
the storm, and reach the harbor in 
safety. And what the compass is to 
navigation, that is moral principle in 
our affairs. 

564. Present-Day Scepticism. — I put 
you on your guard against the scepti- 
cism of our time. And do you think 
that I am about to enlarge upon the 
scepticism of Rousseau, of Diderot, of 
Voltaire, of Bolingbroke, of Hobbes, 
and of Hume, — that was swept away 
with their ashes, and is buried ? The 
great scepticisms of our time are, — 
market scepticism, political scepticism, 
and religious scepticism. Men who 
feel that it would be wicked to sacri- 
fice great pecuniary interests for the 
sake of principle ; men who think it 
would be a tempting of Providence to 
refuse profitable business speculations, 
to leave profitable situations, or to re- 
fuse dividends of evil ; men whose 
consciences will not permit them, as 
the members of a corporation, to ex- 
pose its wickedness ; men who stand 
in the market and feel that they have 
a right to do anything that wins, — 
these men are infidels. You need not 
tell me that they believe in the Bible ; 
they believe in the Bible just as 1 be- 
lieve in birds' nests in winter, — nests 
that have no birds in them. They be- 
lieve in an empty Bible, — a Bible of 
the letter, and not a Bible of the spirit, 
which says to a man, "Sacrifice your 
right hand before your integrity," 

565. Crafty Devices in Business. — 
Where society is organized as it is 
with us, business is sharp and com- 
petitive ; and, aside from the ambition 
to acquire property, comes also the 
feeling of rivalry ; each man measures 
himself with other men about him ; 



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131 



men are perpetually striving against 
each other. And under the stimulus 
of this element of competition, life 
being regarded as a game, nobody 
supposes that he is any less honorable 
because he conceals his intentions, — 
as, in a game of chess, letting his op- 
ponent think that he is bearing down 
with all his forces on certain men, 
while in fact he is seeking to check- 
mate him on another part of the 
board. As in a game of chess, no- 
body thinks any harm is done by the 
exercise of craft, so men think crafty 
devices in business are all right. Men 
rejoice in their smartness, and tell of 
their httle tricks and strifes, of their 
crafts and conflicts. 

566. Christianity in Business. — 
What if some religious humorist, an- 
gelic or spiritual, could to-night get 
access to the great resorts of men, and 
what if to-morrow morning, on going 
to their places of business, they should 
find, over their counting-rooms, and 
desks, and counters, in large and radi- 
ant letters, "Look not every man on 
his own things, but every man also on 
the things of others." How many 
would say, "Who has written this 
here ? Rub it out instantly. Business 
is business. I will have no such texts 
as that in this place. The man who 
attends to his own business is the man 
that prospers." Young men, do not 
believe that infidelity ! 

567. Other Men's Crookedness. — It 
is said to a banker, in reference to a 
transaction in which he has taken ad- 
vantage of another man in business, 
"You did not let him know?" He 
says, "Of course I did not let him 
know." "You deceived him?" 
"Yes, of course I deceived him." 
" Do you think that the way to pros- 
per?" " I have always done so, and 
I have always prospered." Well, let 
him understand that his managing 



clerk is in the habit of deceiving the 
bank officials in regard to the entries, 
in regard to the bookkeeping, and 
does he like it? Does he say, " It is 
immaterial : the bank will not suffer " ? 
He says, "A man that will deceive 
will lie ; and a man that will lie will 
steal ; and such a man is not fit to be 
a managing clerk in a bank." No 
employer will tolerate dishonesty in 
those whom he employs. In other 
words, when you come to the testi- 
mony of men directed by wise self- 
interest, they bear witness that it is not 
safe to have dealings with others who 
do not conform to the law of right- 
eousness. 

568. Self-Deception in Crooked Busi- 
ness. — To a man looking at a sum of 
money, to be gained by devious ways, 
every dollar would be a lens, and 
would show him a picture. Through 
one he would see houses ; through an- 
other he would see paintings and 
statues ; through another he would see 
honors ; and he would say to himself, 
"With this wealth I could surround 
myself with all these things ; and if I 
get it, after I have provided for the 
wants of myself and family, I will 
found schools, and hospitals, and 
churches, and pay the Lord back in 
this way." O, how the devil loves 
to make a pulpit of a man's ear, and 
talk to him of such things ! I never 
saw a man that bribed himself in this 
way, who would not betray his prom- 
ise, falsify, and perjure himself. When 
a man goes into a foul business, prom- 
ising how good he will be, and what a 
good use he will put the proceeds of 
that business to, O, how devil-duped 
he is ! 

569. Business Danger-Signals. — 
Young men, suppose you were trying 
to enter, with your regiment, the lines 
of the enemy, and suppose you had to 
pass over ground where you knew 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



they hud planted torpedoes, and sup- 
pose as quick as one explosion had 
blown out a company, another rushed 
forward and met the same fate as the 
former one, and another, and another, 
would you go over that ground if you 
could help it ? Would you not seek 
some way in which to flank these dan- 
gers so as, if possible, to escape? 
And yet here goes one man down to 
ruin by reason of some commercial 
venture with other people's funds — 
the last man you would believe that 
could be persuaded to run such a risk. 
Here goes another man who stood at 
the very top, in respect to honesty, 
among men. And here goes another. 
How many men must be destroyed 
before it will dawn upon you that you 
are not smart enough to set yourselves 
against integrity in commerce ? 

570. Dangers of Smartness. — Haste 
to be rich is a great danger to men be- 
cause it tempts them to employ illegiti- 
mate means — sleights, craft, disingenu- 
ous ways, violations of honesty. Men 
feel that they can jump laws ; they 
feel, too often, that they are smarter 
than the experience that is traditional. 
. . . They think they are weaving 
cordage : but they are only running 
spiders' webs up and down their ship ; 
and the first storm will break and de- 
stroy the whole of them. It appeals 
to a certain conceit — a subtle element. 
" Seest thou a man wise in his own 
conceit? There is more hope of the 
fool than of him." The moment a 
man thinks he knows more than has 
been ascertained in ages gone by, the 
moment a man thinks all the lessons 
of all mankind about which the public 
now are agreed, are for fools and weak 
men, but not for him, that moment he 
builds in great haste, and with great 
waste. 

571. Dishonest Success Transient. 
— In general, I do not believe that a 



man succeeds and keeps success once 
in a million times, who has not some 
sort of conformity to truth and honesty 
at the bottom — who does not conform 
to them more than he varies from 
them. Many men are like dande- 
lions, whose blossoms are at first 
golden, but soon lose their rich color, 
and are most frangible and transient. 
I see men to-day open their golden 
colors in life, and fan their success un- 
til it globes as fair as this floral orb ; 
and to-morrow I look for them, and the 
place that knew them knows them no 
more forever. The young that are 
pressing forward watch these men, 
and seeing only their first estate, say, 
" We are told that a man cannot suc- 
ceed if he lies or is dishonest ; but 
does not that man lie ? and has he not 
succeeded ? Does not that man cheat ? 
and has he not succeeded?" Ah! 
you must wait till men have run 
through their courses. 

572. Folly of Dishonesty. — I have 
no doubt that the devil overreaches 
himself and cheats himself; but in any 
transaction between you and him, he 
is longer-headed than you are. And 
if a man sells his principles for secular 
prosperity, he shall find in the end 
that the writings drawn and the prom- 
ises made were all spurious. Honesty 
is the best policy ; and of honesty, 
that which has the most of God in it is 
the best. 

573. Worse than Law-Breakers. — 
He crushes one here and another 
there, saying, "I must take care of 
Number One ; and if you would do as 
I do, you would get along all right." 
He has no sense of the obligations of 
humanity. He would not put a pin 
into a man — not at all ; but he would 
put di plan into him, and pierce him to 
the heart. He would not put his hands 
into a man's pocket ; but he would 
take stocks in the street, and influence 



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133 



ilieinin such a way as to destroy five 
hundred men, without even crying, 
"Stand from under!" He goes 
through life making his commercial 
power the means of tripping men up to 
their ruin. 

Such men are not producers — they 
are confusers. They are not working 
in society to increase embodied thought 
or skill. They are not building up 
tlie community in any way. They jise 
men. " In allowable ways," it is said. 
Allowable? Yes, so far as cold law is 
concerned ; but the man that hugs the 
law hugs damnation ! The law? Do 
you suppose that the law can ever be 
enough to measure honor? Can it 
ever be more than enough to mark its 
coarse features ? A man that does not 
live higher than the law, a man that 
has not more truth, more honesty, 
more purity, than the law requires, is 
scarcely fit to be ranked among our 
fellow-men. 

574. Selfish Service. — Have you 
ever seen ants swarm over the rosy 
flower-buds of the opening peony ? 
How they caress it ! How nimble are 
their thousand tickling feet, as round 
and round the circular bud they go 
nursingly ! Is it that ants love flowers ? 
No ! It is that they may lick up the 
sugary secretion which exudes from 
the flower-bud. And so there be 
many that serve men, not because 
they love them, but because they fain 
would suck their substance out of 
them. 

575. Greediness and Emptiness. — 
There is a fish called a sciilpin. Nine- 
tenths of it are mouth, and one-tenth 
body, as I recollect it when a boy. 
Its chief business, apparently, con- 
sists in eating everything. And after 
it has eaten, nothing comes of it. It 
has a big tail, to propel itself with, a 
big head, a big mouth, and a very 
active stomach with which to do the 



work of digestion quickly. But it is 
good for nothing, it furnishes no food. 
It is a do-nothing, gormandizing fish. 
There are many men who are said to 
have the power of making wealth. 
They have. And they are scu/pin 
men. They have an enormous maw, 
which they open and shut quick and 
often, devouring all that comes in 
their way. Nobody can surpass them 
in acquiring property. But what pur- 
pose does this wealth serve ? Do they 
use it as a means for benefiting so- 
ciety ? Is it employed as a sword 
with which to defend the weak ? Is it 
an architect that builds ? Is it a seed- 
sower that distributes ? Or, is this 
quality merely the capacity to take in 
— to ingurgitate, ingurgitate, ingurgi- 
tate? If so, then when misfortune 
comes, and a man loses all his wealth, 
what is left of him ? Nothing, liter- 
ally nothing. 

576. Damages of Money-Getting. — 
I think the most miserable people I 
ever saw were men who were rich and 
nothing else — men who had burned up 
everything in them that was good, in 
order to make wealth. They had 
generosity when they began, but gen- 
erosity is a spendthrift. It helps men 
with the right hand and with the left. 
Generosity in a man who is deter- 
mined to get money is like a gaping 
seam in the side of a ship, and must 
be calked up. Magnanimity is soon in- 
convenient to those who are de- 
termined to get moneys and so is cut 
down, as a tree is cut down, by the 
roots. Large tastes, besides being ex- 
pensive, consume time by diverting 
the attention from money-making pur- 
suits ; and it is a maxim among men 
who are determined to be rich that 
although fine things and things re- 
fining may be well enough for some, 
a real business man must not allow 
himself to be turned aside by them. 



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577. Emptiness of Money-Getters. — 
Mere money-makers go on from ten 
years to ten years, until they come to 
be forty or fifty years of age, and are 
rich, and " can do what they have a 
mind to." No, they cannot. They 
are hke old campaniles, steeples or 
towers, out of which the bells are gone, 
and which are empty. An old ignorant 
man that has given the forces of his 
life to making money, and to nothing 
else— what is society to him ? What 
are friendships to him ? What is love 
to him ? What is praise to him, except 
the sordid praise of money-lovers? 

578. Wrong Earthly Training. — 
Those powers which are to frame your 
glory and joy hereafter, are too often 
either neglected or perverted. They 
are warped and misdirected. The 
eyes of a man's conscience are put 
out. His tastes are blunted. His 
sensibility is dried up. So fierce are 
men to save themselves in this life, 
that they use up that part of them- 
selves by which they are to live for- 
ever and forever. So that when men 
go to the other world, I think ten 
thousand times ten thousand of them 
will find themselves exiles, without 
business, unable to speak the lan- 
guage, destitute of the means of hve- 
lihood, and good for nothing, utterly. 

579. Misfits in Life. — In cities, and 
in business, the proportion of men that 
have mistaken their calling is larger 
than anywhere else. I see men every 
day that are in situations for which 
they are not at all calculated. There 
are multitudes of young men that 
want to be rich in merchandise. They 
will not put their lily hands where the 
sun can brown them. They were 
born, they say, for better things. 
Many of them were born for the poor- 
house, and they will be there in the 
end ! They may meet with a measure 
of success for a time, till the sap of 



youth is gone out of them, and then 
they will be fit only to be cast out, and 
to be trodden under foot of men. 

If you transplant a tree in the spring, 
the sap in it will carry it half through 
the summer, though its roots may be 
dead. It will throw out leaves, and 
appear like a sound tree for a good 
part of the first year. But the next 
year it will die. And every man, 
when he starts in life, has enough of 
the sap of youth to carry him a certain 
way, though he may have mistaken 
his calling ; but in the course of ten 
years, when that sap is expended, and 
he is rootless and branchless, where 
will he be ? 

580. Unmanliness of Complaint. — 
As a man has been educated, so must 
he pursue life ; and to murmur at his 
occupation, to look wistfully at some- 
thing else, to spend his time in think- 
ing what he would like to do, to cover 
some other pursuit with his imagina- 
tion, and make fancied flowers grow 
upon it, and see abundant and varied 
fruit hanging from its boughs, while 
making his own business as barren and 
hateful as possible, and rising in the 
morning to say, " Must I go to work 
again?" and going home at night to 
curse the day's work — this is unmanly 
and mean. 

581. Soul-Destroying Greed. — The 
soul is an instrument more grandly 
made than any harp that ever came 
from human hands; and God, who 
knows what are the melodies of heaven, 
has strung it. Wondrous are the chords 
thereof ; and when men spend their life 
in destroying one and another of them, 
in old age their wandering hands go 
aimlessly through the empty spaces ; 
and there is no sound there. 

582. Excessive Activity. — Great 
men like Count Cavour in Italy, Bis- 
marck in renovated Germany, Bright 
in young England, and Lincoln in our 



BUSINESS ACTIVITY 



135 



own calendar — it is right that they 
should have wasted the very fountains 
of Hfe to bear up their times. A great 
work God gave them to do. They 
live long lives who live much, and 
these men lived the life of a thousand 
ordinary men, though they all broke 
themselves down by excessive tax- 
ation. 

That is not the law of the private. 
It is contrary to the duty of the mass 
of men. And yet, there is many a 
man in this congregation who is sin- 
ning against God every day of his life 
by excessive industry. There is many 
a man and many a woman here who 
is breaking God's laws in nature, and 
breaking them in society, and breaking 
them in social relations, by an unwitting 
exhaustion through excessive activity. 

583. Vacations of the Workers, — 
How many merchants there are who 
are breaking down ! A man ought to 
break down every year for two 
months ; and when a man does break 
down it is a good thing for him to 
break down very low. It is said that 
Antaeus always gained strength by 
touching the ground ; and it is a good 
thing for a man to stretch himself full 
length on the ground, sometimes, and 
smell his mother-earth. 

584. Business and Religious Feel- 
ing. — There is many a man who does 
not suspect it, but when he says, " I 
do not speak in meetings; I have had 
no great experience ; I do not wish 
you to call upon me to pray ; I have 
no gifts in prayer," it is as if I were to 
take a sponge full of water and drip- 
ping, and squeeze it till there was not 
a single drop of water in it, and then 
ask the sponge, " How do you feel?" 
and it should say, " Dry and arid. 
There is no moisture in me." No, it 
is all squeezed out. Here are men 
who take their hearts, that are just as 
full of feeling as anybody else's, and 



squeeze them so dry that there is not a 
drop left. Business has got it all. 
And they come to meetings, and say, 
" 1 have no experience to give. There 
is nothing in me." Why should there 
be ? If you have used it all up for 
this world, of course you have none 
for the world to come. 

585. Recreation Neglected. — Mer- 
chants, business men, lawyers, min- 
isters, all sorts of toiling and laboring 
men, have too little relaxation. We 
are like a violin, going from one con- 
cert to another, all day long, without 
once being unstrung. We are forever 
at concert pitch. It is a fact growing 
out of city life, that the intensity of our 
business takes away our relaxation and 
enjoyment. Laughing, singing, cheer, 
buoyancy, — these, and the various 
other means by which men rest them- 
selves without vohtion, are almost un- 
known to us. We are a world too 
sober. We are a world too unlaugh- 
ing. We do not romp enough with 
our children. We are not children 
enough ourselves. 

586. Retiring from Business. — I 
believe that an upright, honest man, 
doing a fair business, has more enjoy- 
ment while he is doing it, than when 
it is done. While a man is doing 
business, he is plump and succulent as 
a thrifty plant, covered with leaves 
and flowers or fruit ; but when he re- 
tires from business, he is like a last 
year's mullein stalk, leafless, and 
flowerless and fruitless. And woe be 
to a man in this life, and of our Amer- 
ican stock, who thinks that he can 
enjoy himself by standing still. He 
will be like an empty candlestick. 

587. Spiritual Indolence. — A worm, 
a butterfly, a sack of juice — these are 
the three forms of insect life. And 
how many men are there that are 
worms in their beginnings, who, when 
they have gone through their crawling 



'3f' 



SOCIAL LIFE 



l)ciio(i, wing llicii" way in the summer 
warmth for a time, and tlicn go back 
substantially into a chrysalis state ! It 
is a most wicked thing for a man with 
great capacities to go out of the active 
affairs of life in the full strength of 
manhood, and refuse to have any par- 
ticipation in the events of time which 
he sees go thundering on. 

588. Virtues of Business Men. — 
Over against the faults of our business 
men, which in due time and on proper 
occasions I must rebuke, I love to put 
their virtues. Over against those sins 
that belong to commercial life, I love 
to put their deeds of generosity and 
true ChrisUan beneficence. It is the 
merchant's ship that pierces the polar 
ice to bring back the lost navigators, 
or to enrich natural science ; and it is 
the merchant's ship that carries the 
missionary to the tropics to rescue lost 
sinners. 

Say what you will of their faults ; 
say what you will of the petty vices of 
petty traffickers ; say what you will of 
the lordly wrongs committed by im- 
petuous merchant princes, justice re- 
quires also that you should say that 
the whole world is indebted to them, 
and that should they fail to-day, and 
be swept out of society, in all the earth 
tiie lamp of science would burn dim, 
literature would have to throw out new 
roots for support, learning would cry 
for bread, and religion herself would 
no longer go eating and drinking her 
liberal abundance as now, but would 
walk in the wilderness like John, with 
raiment of camel's hair, a leathern 
girdle about its loins, and its meat 
locusts and wild honey. 

589. Moral Intelligence of Com- 
merce. — Commerce knows that igno- 
rance is unthrifty. Commerce knows 
that education, on the globe-scale, 
tells over the counter, and tells in the 
scales of the merchant. Commerce 



knows that industry thrives where 
government is free, and is smothered 
where government is despotic. Com- 
merce knows that, next to the inge- 
nuity that produces, it needs men that 
consume ; and while, in respect to cer- 
tain elements, for limited periods of 
time, it knows that a slave population 
may engorge more rude material than 
a civilized community, it also knows 
that, taking the world in its entirety, 
the more men are educated and de- 
veloped the more wants they have, 
and the more wants they have the 
more demand there will be on the 
anvil, on the loom, in the studio, in 
every place where men minister to 
their higher wants. And commerce 
has learned, not only that the higher 
wants demand a higher form of sup- 
ply, but that this higher form of supply 
is more profitable to the maker as well 
as to the user. It is the interest of 
commerce that the whole world should 
be taught order, industry and intelli- 
gence, and that the whole world 
should rise ; for the bodily want will 
never be less. That which commerce 
should seek is to increase the wants 
that are higher than bodily wants, and 
then supply them. 

590. The Transparent Character. — 
Qualities of truth and honor, which 
the world appreciates and admires, 
and which the Bible recognizes and 
commends, constitute one of the de- 
velopments of a Christian character. 
If you have these qualities, men, after 
they have associated with you for 
years, will bear this testimony respect- 
ing you : " He is like a glass bee-hive. 
You can always see what his motives 
are. He is full of honey. The more 
you know him, the better you will like 
him. He is true and honorable." 

591. The Golden Mean. — The full- 
est and best life must be sought in the 
Temperate Zones. Cold and heat, in 



PROSPERITY AND WEALTH 



137 



excess, are alike, in shutting men up 
and reducing their power over nature. 
The action of nature upon the human 
organization, and of man upon nature, 
constitute the business of hfe. It is 
change that keeps ahve the sense of 
quality. It is small things that make 
things large, and large things that 
make others small. Summer would 
not be half so sweet if there was noth- 
ing but summer. It is the winter that 
makes the summer wonderful. . . . 



Let others have the Equator ; give 
me the Temperate Zones ! And if 
any shall say this is true, not of out- 
ward nature alone, but of human con- 
ditions in life, and that neither ex- 
tremes of poverty nor excessive 
wealth are to be chosen, but that tem- 
perate zone of affairs, midway between 
the golden Equator and the barren 
Poles, I shall not resist the applica- 
tion. It was said long ago, " Give me 
neither poverty nor riches." 



XF. PROSPERITT AND WEALTH 



592. Honor or Shame in Wealth. — 
The man that stands to-day upon a 
pedestal simply because he is rich, 
will in another fifty years stand in the 
pillory if he does not make his riches 
serve mankind. 

593. Power from Effort. — Here is a 
boy who is brought up in the country. 
At an early period of his life he is 
obliged to brave the storm. He has 
no learning, he has no pocket money, 
and he is obliged to dig, to push, to 
endure. Fatigue is familiar to him. 
He has to work in order to get even a 
rudimentary education. The depriva- 
tions to which he is subject are a 
medicine, a ministry, an education to 
him. Day by day he qualifies him- 
self for the future. At last, when he 
has reached the age of twenty-three 
or twenty-four or twenty-five, and has 
entered upon the profession or busi- 
ness of his life, the steel of his blade 
has a temper which nothing can with- 
stand ; he meets responsibilities, and 
overcomes obstacles, and stands at 
the head in his calling : and every- 
body says, "What a strong fellow he 
is!" At forty-five he is very rich; 
and at fifty he is very famous. He 
has boys growing up around him ; and 
he says to himself, "I had a terribly 
hard time ; I remember having my 



fingers frost-bitten, and going bare- 
foot, and sleeping on a hard bed ; and 
I recollect how I used to long to go to 
trainings and celebrations on holidays, 
but how I was kept at home working 
all the while. These boys of mine 
shall have a better chance than I 
had." So he provides them with bet- 
ter clothes than he had when he was 
a boy ; he sends them to school, and 
does not let them know anything 
about work; and they grow up 
smooth, and soft, and pulpy, and are 
good for nothing. They have not the 
power that he has. 

594. Hoarded Wealth. — Unused 
wealth is of no more use to a commu- 
nity than are the men that lie in mauso- 
leums a thousand years old — the dust 
of the sepulcher. Money is like pow- 
der. It has no power until it is set off. 

595. Money to be Used. — Will you 
tell me, in the name of eternal love 
and justice, what right a man has to 
lay up money that he does not use ex- 
cept to roll it over and over, hke a 
snowball, that he may make it more ? 
Money possessed is to be used. It is 
not to be kept without being employed 
to some good purpose. Every mill 
must have a reservoir ; but if the 
water does not run out and turn the 
wheel, the reservoir becomes merely a 



138 



SOCIAL LIFE 



stagnant frog-poml. And so in re- 
spect to money : men who have it 
must spend it. The question for ihcm 
to ask themselves is, " Where and 
how shall I spend it? " 

596. Property to Circulate. — Cir- 
culate your property, and it will never 
hurt you. If you allow it to stagnate, 
it will generate miasma and disease. 

597. Nobility of Wealth with Good- 
ness. — Some of God's noblest sons, I 
think, will be selected from those that 
know how to take wealth, with all its 
temptations, and maintain godliness 
therewith. It is hard to be a saint 
standing in a golden niche. 

598. Duty of the Strong. — If any 
man is rich and powerful, he comes 
under that law of God by which the 
higher branches must take the burn- 
ings of the sun, and shade those that 
are lower ; by which the tall trees 
must protect the weak plants beneath 
them. 

599. Wealth in National Life. — 
Though it goes very much against the 
educated religious feeling of men for 
one to say that the way of riches was 
meant to be the way of religion, yet 
it is true. All barbarous nations arc 
poor. All savage nations are poorer 
yet. All nations that have emerged 
from the animal conditions of life, and 
are standing in some degree of civil 
independence and prosperity, have 
developed riches. All nations that 
are dominant in the history of the time 
have attained to great power through 
riches as well as through culture. 

600. Wealth-Making, a Primary 
Civic Virtue. — The very first steps in 
civilization are, in the providence of 
God, those which are unfolded through 
the making of property. When a 
man begins to develop property, to 
save it, to regard and defend it, he is 
making the first steps, though they 
may be very low, remote and in- 



fantine, in civilization. It is not 
probable that the wandering in- 
habitants of Arabia are a single 
degree different to-day from what 
they were in the days of Abraham. 
They stand, after four thousand years, 
just where they will stand four thou- 
sand years hence, unless some revolu- 
tion takes place among them. The 
elementary virtues are wrought out, 
in the providence of God, through the 
process of wealth-making ; and fore- 
sight, the foreseeing of events, is one 
of the first elements in this process. 
Living by foresight is living by faith ; 
and the process of wealth-making re- 
quires this element, though it be in its 
seminal form. 

60 1. Beneficence of Wealth. — We 
have our dangers. The world would 
not be fit to live in if there were not 
dangers in it. Dangers are God's 
whetstones with which to keep men 
sharp. Men are ground by difficulties. 
Wealth, if it runs towards the animal 
passions, is a great danger ; but if 
wealth runs towards the higher senti- 
ments, it is a beneficent power. And 
blessed be God for wealth ! I could 
almost preach on the duty of being 
rich — though I could not practice my 
own preaching in that respect, any 
more than in many others ! There is 
a mighty power for good in wealth, 
if it goes with the judgment and the 
moral sense. 

602. Wealth to be Diffused. — Riches 
are indispensable to communities, 
though communities are not blessed 
in the proportion in which money is 
heaped up in a few hands, but in the 
proportion in which money is diffused 
through all the average of families. 
Twenty millions of dollars in a village 
does not make that village rich if it is 
all owned by two men ; but if that 
amount is spread evenly, all over the 
village, then it is different. Money, 



PROSPERITY AND WEALTH 



139 



in the hands of one or two men, is 
hke a dung-heap in a barn-yard. So 
long as it hes in a mass it does no 
good ; but if it was only spread out 
evenly on the land, how everything 
would grow ! 

603. Interior not Exterior Quality. — 
Is it a sin to be rich? No, no, 
certainly it is not a sin to be rich. It 
is your duty to be rich, if God has 
armed you with the faculties of wealth- 
making — with the power of amassing 
property. Well, is it wrong for a man 
to be "clothed in purple and fine 
linen"? Why no. A man may be 
just as proud and just as vain under 
drab as under purple. It is not what 
a man has on him, but what a man 
has in him that determines his pride. 
There is no wrong in wearing purple, 
any more than in wearing silk; and 
wearing silk is not a crime any more 
than wearing woolen ; and wearing 
woolen is not a crime any more than 
wearing tow. It is not the dress, but 
what the dress covers, that is to be 
commended or condemned. 

604. True Riches. — The richest 
man in the world is the man who has 
the most warm and glowing sym- 
pathies which connect him with all 
classes and conditions in human life. 
Men are like great trees, which never 
feed by one root, but which spread 
their roots abroad in all manner of 
ramifications, drawing nourishment 
from the earth in every direction. A 
tree which has but one root running 
straight down into the ground, is like 
a man who, by the deceitfulness of 
riches, has cut himself off from all 
sources of sympathetic supply, and 
who ere long becomes branchless for 
want of nourishment, or is over- 
thrown by the storm. 

605. Unfaithfulness of God's Stew- 
ards. — What shocked men more than 
the stories that came up from the seat 



of war, of unworthy nurses and 
surgeons in the army, when the North 
sent down cordials and wine and 
delicacies for the sick and wounded 
in the hospitals, and they never got to 
the soldiers, but were eaten and 
drunk by their guardians? With 
what indignation men heard such 
stories and revolted at them ! But do 
not you take the wine and the bread 
that are given to you as God's stew- 
ards ? Do not you appropriate them 
all to yourselves ? You live to your- 
selves ; you study for yourselves ; you 
think for yourselves ; your pleasures 
are for yourselves, though you have 
the power to make others rich. 

606. Money-Makers. — Go with me 
to Philadelphia, and I will take you 
into the Mint there ; and will show 
you a vast wheeled machine — a steam- 
engine and a die. There are the bars 
of gold and silver which are put in ; 
and every time the stamp goes down, 
it cuts out a dollar, or five dollars, or 
ten dollars. And that machine is just 
like many men. I can point you to a 
dozen men in New York that are 
nothing but great iron machines. 
That is, their whole life is nothing 
more to them than a perpetual effort 
to get rich, or richer. Take out from 
them the simple power of coining 
money, the simple stamping-power, 
and all the rest is of no more value 
than iron machinery. 

607. The Love of Money. — The 
very ends of life which wealth was 
meant to develop and estabUsh — 
loyalty, fidelity, industry, economy, re- 
spect for others' rights — are actually 
sacrificed by those that fall under the 
love of money. Not the love of what 
money can do, not the ambition of do- 
ing something with one's money, but 
the love of money. We laugh to 
scorn the poor idolater who worships 
an image of gold ; and we marvel that 



140 



SOCIAL LIFE 



such creatures as the Athenians should 
ever have worshiped Jupiter carved 
in ivory and gold by the hand of 
Phidias. We marvel that any one can 
worship anything that has no breath 
of life but is mere matter. Why 
should we marvel? I can raise a 
whole regiment of just such men. I 
could march them, I was going to say, 
the whole length of Wall Street. Idol- 
aters, worshipers of gold and silver, 
they are, and with this difference — 
that their gods are not carved even 
into an image. They are without 
form, and void. Men's whole lives 
are regulated by this iUicit love of 
riches which are useless to them. 
For let me tell you that the power of 
riches is what it can do for humanity. 
608. Idolatry of Money. — Anxiety, 
haste to be rich, is apt to change into 
idolatry ; the very ends which men 
have in life are neglected, and the 
man's wealth becomes as an idol 
which he worships. A man that has 
got $150,000 and begins to talk about 
retiring, thinks: "Why, you fool! 
The idea of retiring! You have just 
got going!" And he kindles and 
says : " Well, I think I will stay until 
I have doubled it." Poverty breeds 
money slowly, but wealth breeds 
wealth very fast ; yet there is so much 
that a man can do when he begins to 
amass capital, that he stays until he 
has got $500,000. That would make 
his father stare ; but he has got it, and 
he doesn't use the whole interest of it. 
Ask him what he is doing. " Well," 
he says, " I am in business yet; I am 
increasing my stock." Five hundred 
thousand becomes a million. " Now 
what are you doing with your million 
— the income of it?" "Well, I am 
rolling it over into the capital again " 
— compound interest. And it becomes 
two millions. " What are you doing 
with it? Are you helping the poor 



by better tenements?" " O, no." 
" Are you founding memorial institu- 
tions?" " O, no. I am going to, 
though, some day or other. When I 
die I think I will do something." 
You are dead already, only you don't 
know it ! 

609. Haste to be Rich. — A man 
may become suddenly rich and the 
misfortune may not entirely destroy 
him, though he must be a man of a 
good deal of stamina if it does not : 
but a man that is making haste to de- 
velop riches is a culprit ; because he 
undertakes to develop wealth without 
the necessary condition — relativity, 
quid pro quo, — he is disregardful of the 
great law of equity ; namely, equiva- 
lence. Whoever has an increase of 
wealth must have had that wealth due 
to him by an amount of service that 
holds some just relation between the 
wealth received and the effort that he 
has put forth. 

610. The Wealth of the Unjust. — 
The young are tempted into untruth 
and dishonesty by a want of faith in 
the history of men who have made 
money and died without losing it. 
But you will find that if these men 
heaped up their possessions at the sac- 
rifice of truth and equity, their child- 
ren are not happy in their estate. The 
gold that wicked men wring from the 
suffering, God pours in molten indig- 
nation down the throats of their chil- 
dren. 

611. Perils of Prosperity. — Mercies 
sometimes appear to be like some vines 
that I have noticed. On the western 
side of my place there is a vine that 
has twined about a tree girdling it so 
that the tree has died ; and I have 
seen God's mercies twine about men 
so abundantly that they choked out 
the manhood that was in them. 

612. Unsuccessful Success. — This 
one gets to be a hoary old man ; he is 



PROSPERITY AND WEALTH 



141 



worth twenty millions of dollars ; and, 
if you listen to him at midnight, it will 
be as it was with an eminent financier 
whom I knew, but who has gone now 
— I do not know where — and who was 
heard in the night, tossing in his bed, 
to say, " Oh God ! I wonder when it 
will be morning." He was an effi- 
cient man, and was called one of our 
"princes" ; but he was a miserable 
wretch, notwithstanding. He loved 
nobody, and nobody loved him. He 
bought all the kindness he received. 
He knew there were harpy heirs who 
cursed God that he lived so long. He 
knew that he must leave his money. 
The Lord had put the desert of Sahara 
in his heart — sand, sand ; and not a 
whit less sand because it was gold 
sand. 

613. The Power of Enjoyment. — 
When a man sacrifices everything that 
is noble in his nature to amass wealth, 
he walks up and down the passages of 
prosperity, a miserable wretch. The 
enjoyment of a man does not depend 
upon how much he can control, but 
upon the fiber of his own being. You 
could not ascertain the power of a mu- 
sical instrument by measuring its 
square inches. It is only by the qual- 
ity of its chords or tubes that its power 
can be ascertained. It is not what a 
man holds in his hand, nor the amount 
by which he is surrounded, but the 
quality of the chords of his own soul 
that determines whether or not he is 
capable of happiness. 

614. Selling One's Self. — What if 
the harp, in order to make itself blessed, 
should sell, first, its lowest bass string, 
and then its next one, and then its 
next string, and then its next, and its 
next, until finally every string of the 
harp is sold ? Then , when all the heaps 
of music are piled up before it, and it 
wants to play, it is mute. It has sold 
the very things out of which music 



must needs come. And men that 
" will he rich " give up sensibihty, af- 
fection, faith, manhood, coining them 
all, emptying themselves ; and when 
they get possession of their wealth, 
what is there left for them to enjoy it 
with ? There is no string in the harp 
on which joy can play. 

615. Self-Immured. — I see men who 
are repeating, with golden bricks, the 
old story which is told of an Italian no- 
ble. It is said that he fastened a woman 
in a little niche just large enough for her 
to stand in, that by the masons a row 
of bricks was laid about her, and that, 
thus begun, a wall encircling her rose 
steadily up and up until finally, when 
the last brick was laid, she was left 
standing in her living tomb. It is a 
horrible story ; very likely it is true, 
for they sought horror ingeniously 
then ; but it is not half so horrible as 
what I see going on in New York per- 
petually. There men take golden 
bricks, and lay a circle round about 
themselves, and the wall rises, first up 
to their knees, then up to their breast, 
and then up to their neck, leaving 
their head peering above the bricks. 
Little by little, circle by circle, the wall 
still rises, until by and by there is only 
a small orifice above their head. At 
last the top brick is laid on, that orifice 
is closed, and the man smothers behind 
his golden bricks. All the man that 
was in him is dead. 

616. Earthly Abundance ; Heavenly 
Poverty. — As statues and pictures in 
overwhelmed cities of the Orient have 
for a thousand years lain covered with 
the soil, so the aspirations that early 
manifested themselves in many a 
wealthy man have long been covered 
by the soil of business and pleasure. 
Men say he is prosperous, and they 
pass by his grounds with a certain 
sense of awe. To them there is a 
kind of mysterious grandeur about his 



142 



SOCIAL LIFE 



house ; and they know not but he is 
well-nigh omnipotent. 

By and by, when he goes to heaven, 
he will carry up everything that be- 
longs to his spiritual excellence, and 
leave here everything that belongs to 
his temporal excellence. He will 
leave here his grounds, his house, its 
furniture, and pictures, and books, his 
stable and horses, his body, its pas- 
sions, and tastes, all earthly lore, 
everything that belongs to the flesh. 
He will carry with him nothing but his 
generosity — and you could take that 
on the point of a needle ; his faith — 
and there is but a speck of that ; and 
all the heroic elements of his nature — 
and there is not as much as a pinch of 
them. He was everything here : there 
he is nothing. 

617. Wealth no Title to Remem- 
brance. — There are multitudes of enor- 
mously rich nothings living now in 
New York, who soon will be pricked 
by death ; and then in a moment they 
will be gone. What does a thirsty 
man care for the cloud that brought 
the water which he drinks ? He has 
got what he wants, and the cloud is 
gone, and is forgotten. And heirs for- 
get the man by whom money is handed 
down to them ; or they remember him 
only to curse him for living so long, 
and worrying out their patience as he 
did. A man that is a mere muck-rake 
has nothing in him that men want to 
remember. I like a fire ; but I never 
thought of praising the coal-scuttle in 
which the coal was brought to make 
it. Men like money ; but they do not 
care for those who scrape it together. 

If, however, a man organizes his 
money so that when he is gone that 
money keeps at work for the best side 
of human nature, and for the best 
side of human society, then that man, 
being dead, though he was rich, yet 
speaketh. 



618. Wealth Used for Mankind 

There has gone, at last, through the 
gate of the grave, the spirit of a man, 
honest, industrious, simple of habit 
and taste, gathering wealth that like 
the sower he might sow it again to 
bring up harvests in other fields than 
his own ; and all the city bows down 
to him. He has never been king, 
prince or president. He has never 
shown great philosophical acumen, 
nor has he been a discoverer straying 
through strange fields of science. He 
has been a manly man, who lived for 
his fellow-men ; and the whole popu- 
lation of the city pours out, and asks 
as a privilege permission to look upon 
the dead face of Peter Cooper. Un- 
covering, they reverence the man who 
was honest, whose whole heart was in 
sympathy with his kind, and who de- 
voted the energy of his life to the serv- 
ice of his fellow-men. May God in- 
crease the procession of such men ! 
He will increase it. It is a tendency. 
Now, to-day, only here and there 
you shall see a crocus peeping out, 
or the buds on the willow giving 
token of the coming spring ; but by 
this promise you know that ere long 
the whole air will be perfumed with 
bloom. 

619. Lost Wealth Appreciated. — 
It is trite, that " Men do not know 
how to value health till they lose it." 
It is the same with wealth. No man 
that has it appreciates it half so much 
while he is in the possession of it as 
when he has lost it. So long as we 
are getting it, so long as we are having 
it, so long as we are increasing it, we 
undervalue it. It is not what we have, 
but the more which we mean to have, 
that we set our heart on. Oh ! if God 
would but make our bag full of holes, 
that our wealth might be distributed 
along the road, and we not discover 
it until a half was gone, the other half 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



H3 



would be worth more to us than the 
whole, as a power for pleasure. 

620. Cumbering Prosperity. — Ah ! 
the loss of things in this world is often- 
times great gain. Have you noticed 
that frequently, in the abundance of 
the leaves of summer, both the land- 
scape and the mansion are hidden ? 
Though it is a sad time, and we do 
not like to see the leaves turn sere ; 
though we dread the coming of the 
frosts, yet behold, when, in the morn- 
ing after the frosts, every tree is bare, 
and not a leaf is left, as we look there 
appears a house that we have not seen 
all summer. The leaves hid it ; but 
now that the leaves are gone, it shines 
out to our view. And the landscape 
— the mountains and the distant river — 
which has so long been obscured, is 
revealed to us. What a wonderful 
vision is opened when the leaves fall ! 

Many and many a man whose pros- 
perity has been like thick foliage be- 
fore his eyes, could not see his Father's 
house, had no view of Mount Zion, of 
the heavenly Jerusalem nor of the 
beautiful landscape beyond ; but when 
adversity came and stripped him bare, 



and people said, " He is ruined ! he 
is gone ! " — he was richer than ever. 

621. Money Not the Man. — After 
all, money is like a sword in the hand 
of a warrior — it is that by which he 
works, but is not he. If the warrior 
is to have a name, and to be illustrious 
in history, his honor, his courage, and 
his devotedness to duty are the ele- 
ments that make him — not the instru- 
ments which he employs in his tasks 
and labors of love. 

622. Character the Test of Success. 
— A man may be outwardly success- 
ful all his life long, and die hollow and 
worthless as a puff-ball ; and a man 
may be externally defeated all his life 
long, and die in the royalty of a king- 
dom established within him. That 
man is a pauper who has only outward 
success ; and that man may be a 
prince who dies in rags, untended, and 
unknown in his physical relations to 
this world. And we ought to take the 
ideal in the beginning that a man's 
true estate of power and riches is to 
be in himself : not in his dwelling ; 
not in his position ; not in his external 
relations, but in his own character. 



Xri. POFERTT AND ADVERSITT 



623. God's Mint. — Adversity is the 
mint in which God stamps on us his 
image and superscription. 

624. Trials Test Strength. — A 
house built on sand is, in fair weather, 
just as good as if builded on a rock. 
It is trial that proves one thing weak 
and another strong. 

625. Worry. — If you do not know 
where the next loaf is to come from, 
what will you do ? Going to be anx- 
ious, are you ? Is Anxious a baker, 
that he will bring you bread ? 

626. What This World is For. — 
The world is a grindstone, and races 
are axes which are to get their cutting 



edges by being ground on it ! The 
very object for which God thinks it 
worth while to turn and roll this round 
globe is that, by its attrition and work- 
ing, men may be made men, in every 
sense of the term. 

627. Prosperity and Adversity. — 
If you lay wax on a rock and let the 
sun pour its heat upon them, the wax 
will melt and run down, but the rock 
will not. If instead of this you bring 
frost to bear upon them, the wax will 
grow hard and the rock will split in 
pieces. Now in men there are some 
things that prosperity will bring out 
and let you see, and some things that 



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adversity will bring out and let you 
see. It takes both these things to de- 
velop a man's nature so that he or his 
friends can know what he is. 

628. Right Effect of Trouble, — 
God sometimes makes a man's heart a 
threshing-floor, where he threshes him 
in order that the chaff and the straw 
may be taken away, and that the 
wheat may be left. And every stroke 
carries blessing with it ; for the wheat 
rattles out, and all that is worthless is 
thrown aside and perishes. 

629. Man's Need of Adversity. — 
A dull axe never loves grindstones, 
but a keen workman does ; and he 
puts his tool on them in order that it 
may be sharp. And men do not like 
grinding ; but they are dull for the 
purposes which God designs to work 
out with them, and therefore he is 
grinding them. 

630. Certainty of Trouble. — A 
plough is coming from the far end of 
a long field, and a daisy stands nod- 
ding, and full of dew-dimples. That 
furrow is sure to strike the daisy. It 
casts its shadow as gayly, and exhales 
its gentle breath as freely, and stands 
as simple, and radiant, and expectant, 
as ever ; and yet, that crushing fur- 
row, which is turning and turning 
others in its course, is drawing near, 
and in a moment it whirls the heed- 
less flower with sudden reversal under 
the sod. 

And as is the daisy, with no power 
of thought, so are ten thousand think- 
ing, sentient flowers of hfe, blossoming 
in places of peril, and yet thinking 
that no furrow of disaster is running 
in towards them, — that no iron plough 
of trouble is about to overturn them. 
Sometimes it dimly dawns upon us, 
when we see other men's mischiefs 
and wrongs, that we are in the same 
category with them, and that perhaps 
the storms which have overtaken them 



will overtake us also. But it is only 
for a moment, for we are artful to 
cover the ear, and not listen to the 
voice that warns us of our danger. 

631. Unwise Character-Building. — 
A man goes and builds his house — 
a little cottage — under the edge of the 
Alps. The winter has been working 
and brewing up there for many weeks, 
and has laid in a good store of winter 
grain in the form of specks and par- 
ticles of snow. Soon spring comes, 
and the sun begins to work. Some 
day the man goes into the valley on 
an errand; and while he is gone, 
with a thunderous crash down comes 
the avalanche, and in one moment 
his cottage and garden are blotted 
out ! When he comes back he finds 
only tumultuous heaps of snow and 
ice where his little estate was ; and he 
says, " What under heaven is the 
reason that my home and my industry 
should be singled out as a mark, and 
that I should be left a poor, miserable, 
bereaved man, I cannot conceive! " 
A man that builds his house under an 
avalanche, is sure to be singled out 
when summer comes ! 

Here are men whose life is essen- 
tially secular, root and branch, from 
side to side, from skin to core, and 
from core back to skin again. All 
through they are not only secular, but 
they are intensely vivified with the 
immoderation of passion and ambition 
and desire ; and when in due course 
of divine procedure there comes the 
suffering incident to these things, 
these men are apt to turn around and 
say, "I cannot understand why it is 
that I should be made to suffer." 

632. Trouble is Discord. — Let one 
string of a piano be out of tune, and 
all the rest of the piano is at enmity 
with it. That note wails and wails, 
and all the other notes are sweet- 
sounding. By and by the hand of 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



HS 



llie tuner begins to bring it up ; and 
up and up it goes, crying and whin- 
ing ; but the moment it touches the 
concert-pitch it falls in, and there is 
no longer any conflict of one note 
with the other. The moment it comes 
into harmony, there is no longer any 
"wolfing" of vibrations, no longer 
any turmoil. It is in tune. And the 
first effects of the sorrows and trou- 
bles of this world are but the dis- 
cordant wails that men make when 
God attempts to bring them up into 
harmony, 

633. Adversity, — The kettle is taken 
to the brazier, who with hammer com- 
mences the work of beating in a dent ; 
and out cries the suffering metal, 
"Lord, why is this? I thought you 
were in favor of me, and were going 
to do me good, and, behold, you are 
subjecting me to the most excruciating 
torture!" Ah! your prosperity 
bulges you out ; and adversity is 
God's correcting hammer by which 
you are set right, 

634, Blessing in Trouble, — When 
tender grasses start in the spring on 
the meadows along the Connecticut, 
the farmers rejoice. But the snows 
melt, the rains pour, the burdened 
river cannot carry all its treasure, and 
it overflows its banks, and submerges 
the fields. When the waters subside 
a deposit of mud has blotted out every 
spear of grass. But, behold ! in a 
few weeks the blades shoot up through, 
and never was there such burden on 
fields as in the harvest day there is 
on these, that seemed to have been 
destroyed ; for the slime and mud 
fed the fields instead of destroying 
them. 

And so has it often been in the 
world's history, that torrents which 
seemed to be destruction, in the end 
enriched rather than destroyed what 
they submerged. 



635. Sweetness After Adversity. — I 
do not know what some fruits do 
when the frost falls on them. I know 
this : that before the frost falls on them 
they are so sour that we cannot touch 
them without puckering our mouths, 
and that afterwards they are so sweet 
that the boys cannot help stealing 
them. Before the frost comes how 
firmly the chestnut-burs hold the nuts ! 
but after the frost has fallen upon 
them, how they relax their grasp and 
let the nuts rattle down ! 

There are many men that find no 
peace till God has frosted them — till 
by cares and troubles and suffering he 
has compelled them to look away 
from things of this world for comfort 
and support. 

636. Discipline of Trouble. — Tro uble 
is not necessarily penal. It may spring 
from an evolution of natural law, or 
social hability in connection with indi- 
viduals and communities and nations. 
Comprehensively viewed, all our 
trouble is permitted to come upon us 
for the same reason that we put an 
instrument on a grindstone. In the 
one case the object is to sharpen the 
instrument, and in the other case the 
object is to profit us, to enlarge us, to 
strengthen us, to make us richer. 
Looked at as a whole, the divine gov- 
ernment plans both joy and sorrow, 

637. How to Take Trouble, — In 
battle it would be a good thing if, 
when the onset comes, the enemy 
would run away ; but it is a great deal 
better if they stand and fight, and you 
beat them by more skill, and more 
strength, and more courage. In a 
thousand things that annoy, our first 
idea almost invariably is to get rid of 
them. It is natural, not specially 
wicked ; but there is a nobler way. If 
the thing is not removed, if under 
prayer and solicitation God's provi- 
dence does not intervene to take away 



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the burden, we should take it up, we 
should understand that we are to bear 
tills burden, that we are to carry this 
sorrow, that we are to seek our peace, 
not by riddance of it but by rest in the 
Lord. 

638. Beneficence of Adversity. — All 
the wild mixture, all the confusion, all 
the sorrow and the suffering, is dis- 
cerned of Thee. As is the palette to 
the painting, as is violence to develop- 
ment in strength, as is the crushing of 
the grape to the wine, so in Thy sight 
all things are benelicent that to us are 
most confusing and seemingly con- 
flicting and threatening. 

639. Bearing the Reproach of Christ. 
— When God destroys your plans, and 
throws you to the very ground, and 
breaks all the threads in the loom 
which you were weaving, and says to 
you, " Begin again," is there any 
Christ for you at that point of over- 
throw ? Can you go forth unto your 
Saviour marking that place in his life 
where he was overthrown, identifying 
it in some way by association with 
your overthrow ? Can you stand re- 
joicing with Christ at that very point 
of humiliation and crucifixion ? How 
seldom are men noble enough to know 
their opportunities ! The best things 
to strengthen us we go mourning over, 
as if they were the graveyards of our 
hope. They are not : they are the 
open windows of God through which 
shines the light of the higher life. 

640. Heroes of Adversity. — Angels 
know what to write down. When you 
laid the foundations of that big house, 
they forgot to record it in heaven. 
And when the walls went up, and the 
beautiful apartments were finished, 
and the whole magnificent structure 
was completed, as sure as you live 
they forgot to put that down. But 
when that man went down out of his 
splendid mansion into a fourth-class 



house in an obscure street, shedding it 
may be some tears as a tribute of 
nature, and gathered his little flock on 
the first evening around the fire and 
made the room bright with love, and 
faith and prayer, you may be certain 
that they put that down. They re- 
membered that. And when that man 
went on from day to day, and from 
week to week, there was not one 
noble heart-beat, not one generous 
purpose of fidelity, not one resistance 
to temptation, not one thing that made 
him a man in his trouble, that God did 
not see and angels record. 

641. Property not Manhood. — A 
Christian parent says to his child, 
" You must not grow up to think that 
you must have a great house, a 
retinue of servants, fine equipage, 
etc. ; you must understand that truth, 
virtue, honor, manhood, and things 
like these, are the best things in the 
world." But trying times come, and 
a change comes over the father. He 
is haggard ; he cannot eat his break- 
fast ; he drinks down an over-strong 
cup of tea, and away he goes ; he 
does not come back to his accustomed 
meal ; and when he docs come back 
he is in a troubled, uneasy state of 
mind. Things go on so for a fort- 
night, and the child at last goes to his 
mother and asks what is the trouble. 
After some hesitation as to whether it 
is proper to answer the question the 
mother ventures to say, " My child, 
your father is exceedingly afraid that 
he is going to fail, to lose his goods, 
and money." " Well, but pa told me, 
the other day, that I must not care for 
such things as houses, and lands, and 
stores, and goods ; and that truth, and 
virtue, and honor, and manhood were 
the best things to bring me up on : is he 
going to lose those ? " If the mother 
tells the truth, oftentimes, she would 
have to say, " I am afraid he is, and that 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



HI 



is the worst of it." For where a man 
loses the outside, the inside is apt to 
go too. He risks the inside to save 
the outside, and when the devil has 
secured the one, he takes the other. 

642. Wealth in Poverty. — If in 
Kansas, just now, by reason of long 
snow, the careful husbandman whose 
starving cattle have but a faint chance 
of living the winter through, sees a 
wisp of straw, a handful of stalks, or a 
particle of hay being wasted, it sorely 
grieves him. He is so near to the 
edge of starvation that he cannot 
afford to have anything wasted. But 
go into Illinois and Indiana, where all 
these things are abundant, and where 
the herds are their own harvestmen, 
and tramp down a thousand times 
more than they eat, and the farmer, 
when he sees the stack gnawed, and 
scattered around, knee deep, and 
being wasted, says, " There is no need 
of my saving such little things ; they 
are mere trifles ; I have so much that 
I do not know what to do with it." 

The apostle, arguing according to 
the same principle says, " What is a 
little waste here ? The rinds and 
crumbs of life — a little sorrow ; a little 
loss ; a little contempt ; a few per- 
secutions and afflictions and troubles 
— what are these in the great circle of 
God's eternal world ? There I am 
rich and honorable ; and what differ- 
ence does it make if here I am the off- 
scouring of the world ? " 

643. Humble Beginnings of Great- 
ness. — If you had gone to Wesley's 
room, when John and Charles met in 
the University, and Whitefield and 
others met with them, and looked 
upon this handful of men who were 
deiided as the offscouring of the earth 
in their day, you would never have 
suspected what a fair fabric was to 
arise through their humble instrumen- 
tality. For God seemed to be every- 



where but with them. No flaming 
chariot came down to them, no silver 
trumpet sounded before them. They 
were poor, hated, bemobbed men. It 
was on that very account that they 
became the men they did. The same 
elements were with them which ac- 
companied the advent of the Babe of 
Bethlehem. For whenever Christ is 
born into the world, he comes in as 
when he was first born. He came in 
at the bottom ; he came in through a 
manger, with the poor standing round 
about him. 

644. Truth Spread by Persecution. 
—He that smites the thistle, replants 
the thistle over broad places. He that 
smites the ripe barley head and the 
ripe wheat head is a sower of the 
seed, though he may destroy the seed 
bed in which it ripens. So, often, in 
this world the apparent destruction of 
influences for good is the burying 
them only that they may come up 
again. 

645. Rough Handling by Provi- 
dence. — Here is an old barrel that 
leaks, that will hold nothing, and that 
is good for nothing. It is sent to a 
cooper. He takes it and puts hoops 
on it, and with his hammer drives them 
down, whirling it round, and round, and 
round ; and nobody says, " Poor old 
barrel ! " but everybody says, " That 
is a good thing to do ; it ought to be 
done ; now it will be good for some- 
thing." And we ought not to bemoan 
the condition of men when they are 
handled roughly by divine Provi- 
dence for their own improvement and 
benefit. 

646. Hidden Beauty Revealed, — 
Did you ever go out on a mineralogical 
expedition to seek crystals ? Do you 
know that the finest crystals you get 
you do not get till you break the rock ? 
When with many hard blows you suc- 
ceed in rending the rock asunder, to 



148 



SOCIAL LIFE 



your amazement, there stands, half 
disclosed, an exquisite crystal which 
you never would have seen if it had 
not been for those blows. So God finds 
crystals by hard blows in human life. 

647. God's Sculpture. — A great 
block of marble has been blown out 
of the quarry, and brought to a sculp- 
tor's studio, and feels proud of itself, 
as it stands on end, propped up, and 
says : " How much there is of me ! " 
It looks with contempt on little slabs 
just big enough for a gravestone, or 
something like that. But one day a 
sculptor like Michael Angelo — of whom 
Vasari says when he was in the fury of 
inspiration he would chisel from a 
block of marble more material than 
three men could carry away — begins 
to knock off from it part after part ; 
and it says within itself, "Good heav- 
ens! what does he mean? He is re- 
ducing me ! He is taking off from me 
all that in which I gloried." By and 
by he has cut it down to such a 
slender form that instead of being a 
gigantic block of marble it is begin- 
ning to have the outlines of a man. 
When the head is at last set free, as it 
is by taking from the trunk, and the 
sculptor begins to delineate the fea- 
tures — the brow, the eye, and the im- 
mortal lips (significant more than any 
other feature) — the statue gains in 
value by what it loses. 

In this life God is rudely fashioning 
us. By sorrow, and suffering, or by 
joy and hope and inspiration, he is 
shredding us off, taking this and that 
away, and lifting us above time-influ- 
ences ; and all these processes are de- 
veloping that grandeur of spiritual life 
— which is representable, after all, not 
by stone, but rather by flame, forever 
the same, but ever flickering and 
changing. 

648. Braving Trouble. — We should 
brave trouble as the New England 



boy braves winter. . . . Does he 
shrink and cower down beneath the 
fences, or run into the nearest house 
to warm himself? No : he buttons up 
his coat and rejoices to defy the blast 
and tosses the snow-wreaths with his 
foot. And so, erect and fearless, with 
strong heart and ruddy cheek, he 
goes on to his place at school. 

649. Disciplinary Treatment. — A 
man stands by a piano, with one hand 
on the key and the other on the 
chord, and as he tightens the chord it 
cries, " Don't, don't, don't, don't," 
until, at last, it is tuned ; and no harm 
is done to the instrument, either. So 
God does to us ; and so we do to 
others. It is a musical ear seeking 
harmony — not a hard hand seeking 
regularity. 

650. Issue of Tribulation. — The flax 
in the field sighs to be made into the 
garment of the saints. All right. 
Pluck it up ; rot it, put it under the 
brick, thread it, weave it, bleach it, 
purify it ; and the saints may wear it 
now. It came to honor and glory 
through much suffering. " Who are 
these arrayed in white ? These are 
they that have come out of great trib- 
ulation and washed their robes and 
made them white in the blood of the 
Lamb." Suffering is God's guardian 
guiding angel to those that will. 

651. Fire of Affliction. — Have you 
ever seen tools made ? If it be a 
chisel, or a hammer, or whatever it 
may be, that is manufactured, the 
workmen take it from the rude metal 
and give it its general shape ; it is 
passed from hand to hand in the proc- 
ess of manufacture, until, finally, 
when the form has been perfected, 
and everything has been done except 
the tempering it, they take their little 
furnace of charcoal, with a gridiron 
over it, as it were, and place the tool 
thereon, and apply heat, and watch it 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



149 



to see certain colors come ; and when 
they discern the signs for which they 
are looking, they take it off and 
plunge it, sometimes into water, some- 
times into oil, and sometimes into this 
or that of various other liquids. But 
the moment the color determines that 
the temper which they want has been 
attained, the work is done. All the 
rest is mere polishing. The shape is 
first secured, and then the quality 
comes with the tempering. 

Now, we are all wrought, in this 
life, as it were, in one furnace, on one 
anvil, and we are passed from hand to 
hand till we receive certain disciphne 
and certain general shapes ; but no 
man is fit for the Lord's tool-chest un- 
til he has been tempered ; and temper- 
ing is a thing which is done by flame 
— by heat. 

652. Body and Soul.— Once on a 
summer's day I went with my brother 
to extract a crystal from a rock. 
With a mighty sledge-hammer he 
vigorously dealt blow after blow upon 
the rock, and chipped off piece after 
piece. At last the top of the crystal 
appeared. Then one might see what 
he was after, for it had not shown 
upon the outer surface of the rock. 
When the crystal appeared the ques- 
tion was how so to break the rock 
away from it, and how so to strike the 
rock, as to extract the crystal. The 
rock was good for nothing. The 
crystal was everything. 

The soul is man's crystal. The 
body is but the encasing rock that 
holds it. God's providences are smit- 
ing the rock, breaking it away, and 
extracting the precious crystal, worth 
infinitely more than its setting. 

653. Kindness of Pain. — A child 
has been thrown from a wagon, and 
its leg is fractured. Its father, a phy- 
sician and surgeon, comes home and 
sets the limb, and encourages the child 



as he does so. He says, "My boy, I 
will hurt you as little as 1 can, but 
you shall not be crippled because I 
am too tender to take care of you." 
And the bones grate and crack as 
they go into their places. The child 
screams and pleads, but the father 
none the less holds him firmly and 
completes the operation. He disre- 
gards his outcries and entreaties, not 
because he does not care for him, but 
because he does care for him. 

654. Penalty Guards Safety. — Is 
God terrible when he stands behind a 
sinner, and won't let him go down — 
when he stands like a sharp-pointed 
hedge near him ? A hedge is a good 
thing if there is a precipice on the 
other side. The thorns may scratch a 
man, and he does not like them, but 
he likes them better than he likes 
death. Pain and penalty are parts of 
God's mercy towards the race, that 
otherwise, in uncontrolled animalism, 
would wreck itself and be destroyed. 

655. Good Fortune in Early Hard- 
ships. — When the army of fowls pre- 
pare for their young, they do not sit 
down upon the fat marshes of the 
south, or on the sedgy edges of south- 
ern rivers. They lift themselves into 
the heavens and sail to the Arctic 
circle, and there, upon rocks, under 
the edge of ice, find security for their 
young. New England was the breed- 
ing-ground of America. Her seclu- 
sion and her hard ways were mercies. 
It was not in soft places and amidst 
Egyptian leeks and onions and melons 
and cucumbers that Israel planned the 
Hebrew commonwealth, but under the 
crags of Sinai, and along the sands of 
the wilderness. The pitiable part of 
our Colonial history is the best part of 
it, and its glory. 

656. To "Endure Hardness." — It 
seems hard that the Puritans should 
have been treated with such contempt 



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as was lieaped upon them. Well, it 
depends upon what was to be made of 
them. When a man wants to make a 
sword, he does not deal with it as you 
would deal with a baby that you 
wanted to soothe. He takes the ore, 
and plumps it into a red-hot furnace, 
and melts it, and takes it out, and puts 
it back again, and stews it over, and 
suljjects it to a series of other purify- 
ing processes, and at last it comes out 
steel. Then he puts it under a trip- 
hammer, which smites it as if the 
thunder were kissing it, until every 
particle that flies off from it is like a 
spark of fire. Then it is good to make 
swords that will stand in the day of 
battle. It must go through fire and 
water if you would have it make 
a sword that will not betray you 
in the hour of trial. When God 
made the Puritans, he made them 
as we make swords. And men that 
pulled them out of their scabbards 
wished they could push them back 
again ! 

657, Glory Out of Obscurity. — 
When the Huguenots, the Vaudois, 
and the various European nations that 
suffered under persecutions in the 
wilderness, in the mountains, and in 
caves, were driven out, they were un- 
known, they were of little influence, 
they were the poor of the earth, they 
were looked down upon by princes, by 
priests, and by arch-priests, they were 
regarded as rubbish; for their faith's 
sake they suffered loss of property, 
loss of home, loss of their own kin- 
dred, and were subjected to every 
strait and stress of affliction, and they 
became heroes. To-day our children 
read their history ; they are living 
still; and with an invisible influence 
they are lifting up men's thoughts to 
higher spheres and to nobler patience 
and endeavor, by reason of their con- 
duct as sufferers. 



658. The Cost of Good.— There is 
no good done that is not accomplished 
through the medium of somebody's 
suffering. No great thought was ever 
born, no great principle was ever 
wrought out, except by toil and trouble 
and suffering, proportionate to the 
good that it effected. God measures 
the magnitude of blessings by the suf- 
ferings that men are willing to bear 
for the sake of attaining them. 

When in the peace and serene joy 
of the tranquil household children sit 
round about the encircled table, how 
little do they know that all their de- 
light and all their sweet peace has 
been purchased by midnight vigils, by 
maternal tears, by parental strivings 
with God! 

659. " Persecuted for Righteousness' 
Sake."^ — Persecution which is caused 
by true goodness drives men more en- 
tirely from the resources of the animal 
and secular life, and develops in them 
to greater strength and intensity their 
truly spiritual or divine part ; and in 
that state their joys increase in ele- 
vation, in conscious purity, in peace- 
fulness. They live in another realm, 
which, invisible but potential, springs 
up around them. Dispossessed of 
common pleasures, they find them- 
selves filled with other joys, unspeak- 
able and full of glory, " Theirs is the 
kingdom of heaven." 

660. Living Beyond Malice. — At the 
edge of the evening, in times like those 
of the old Anti-Slavery movement, I 
stop at a certain house, but only for a 
moment, and then go along the street 
and put up for the night at another 
house. The mob think I am staying 
at the house where I first stopped; and 
during the night I hear a tremendous 
noise, and looking out of my window, 
I see that the fellows are yelling hid- 
eously in front of that house, and pelt- 
ing it with stones and mud ; but I am 



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151 



not there, and I laugh. Many things 
are said, and many attacks are made 
by men ; they are made at what they 
think I am, and are made where they 
think I am ; but I am not there at all, 
and they do not touch me. It is an- 
other sort of person altogether that 
they are attacking ; and so I laugh. 

661. Vitality of Truth When 

truth in any age has apparently been 
destroyed, it has only died as the seed 
dies to come up again a hundredfold. 

662. Superior to Environment. — I 
do not despise garden flowers that are 
the product of skill, and of the high- 
est horticultural art — ranks and de- 
grees of them ; beds, multitudes of 
them. I like to see them. But now 
and then, wandering through the field 
or highway, or aside in some corner, I 
see a gracious blossom, the seed of 
which, perhaps, the birds sowed, or it 
was blown there from its parent. In 
all the gardens there is not a more 
beautiful flower ; and set off by the 
barrenness of its surroundings it sur- 
prises and delights me. So have I 
seen under the most unfavorable ex- 
ternal circumstances a radiance of 
faith, and a quiet, sanctified pride, 
with a vision of the future, and a hope 
that maketh not ashamed. 

663. Trouble as a Guide. — A man, 
walking along a path at night, as long 
as it is smooth feels that he is in the 
path; but by and by, falling into some 
quag, he says, "What! quags in 
good roads?" And then he says, 
" Oh ! no, I am not in the road. The 
road is pleasant and easy; and if I get 
my feet into the mud, it is because I 
am not in the road." What, then, is 
the fact but this : that if a man only 
knows the right path, he goes on with- 
out suffering, and that if he suffers, it 
is because he is not in the right path ? 

664. Conceit of Strength. — Men 
who have always thrust obstacles 



aside come to think their power in- 
vincible, and to make themselves bat- 
tering rams against fate and circum- 
stance. And when God comes down 
to oppose them, at first they try to 
wrestle with him; but they limp all 
their life after, like Jacob of old, for 
God never wrestles with a man with- 
out throwing him. 

665. Great Thoughts Destroy Small 
Troubles. — If you are traveling lazily, 
and some clumsy passenger sets his 
carpet-bag down so that it grazes you, 
scratches your skin, and causes you 
pain, you very Hkely say, " Block- 
head ! Can't see ! " When you are 
in a quiet, listless state, small things 
disturb your peace. But suppose a 
man is rescuing his child from a con- 
flagration ; his whole soul is kindled 
by affection, and he is dashing here 
and there without regard to his own 
comfort or safety ? It will not be un- 
til hours afterwards, that he finds out 
that his hand is gashed, or that his 
foot is bruised. Under the inspiration 
of a noble feeling, troubles and suffer- 
ings are forgotten, and outward things 
almost cease to have power over men. 

666. Discomfort Glorified. — When 
the clouds drop down low, and it is 
rainy and chilly and misty, there is 
nothing in them but discomfort ; but 
when, the sun having risen, they get 
off a little distance, we cry, "Oh! 
see the rainbow ! " What is the rain- 
bow ? Nothing but that cloud which, 
when it is passing you, weaves a 
garment that is disagreeable and hate- 
ful to you, but which, when it is re- 
moved a little distance from you, 
with the sun shining on it, is clothed 
with glory and beauty. Dull duties, 
a little way off, may become God's 
rainbows to men. 

667. Tempered AflHiction. — When I 
was a boy, nothing suited me so well 
as to have my father whip me when 



152 



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my clothes were on. Tlien I could 
bear it with the utmost equanimity. 
It was when he took me at advantage, 
in the morning, before 1 was dressed, 
that I did not like whipping ! I have 
heard many people say, " If God only 
tempered affliction so that it came on 
the spot where I did not feel it, I 
could bear it." But what sort of 
affliction would that be ? 

668. Training by Trouble. — How 
is it, brother ? I do not ask you 
whether you hke the cup which you 
are now drinking ; but look back 
twenty years. Almost every one of 
you can think of some trouble which 
you experienced twenty, or ten, or 
five years ago, and which at the time 
seemed to you like midnight. It 
bowed you down, and you felt as 
though your heart was bursting in 
twain. Now it is all over, and it has 
wrought out its effect on you, and I 
ask you, Would you give out of your 
education those twists and twirls which 
you suffered under? You were gold 
in the rock ; and God played miner, 
and blasted you out of the rock ; and 
then he played stamper, and crushed 
you ; and then he played smelter, 
and melted you ; and now you are 
gold free from the rock by the grace 
of God's severity. And you say, " I 
would not exchange what I learned 
from these things for all the world." 

669. Recuperation under Adversity. 
— When trees grow so that their 
branches are mostly on one side, we 
cut the most barren side, and there 
nature, in seeking to restore what we 
cut, drives out new buds and branches. 
Where the gardener puts the knife 
there will follow the fruit of the tree. 
And blessed are they whom the heav- 
enly Husbandman prunes, that they 
may bring forth more fruit, if, when 
he cuts, there is a bud behind the 
knife. But woe to them who, being 



cut, have no bud to grow, and are 
more disbranched and barren from 
being pruned ! 

670. Persecution Should Sweeten 
Men. — It does not hurt a man to be 
abused. Frost does not hurt a chest- 
nut. It does not hurt hard autumn 
fruit. It takes the prickly cover off 
from the one, and turns the juices of 
the other to sugar. I do not know of 
anything that is made sour by frost, 
except men. They sometimes are. 
Persecutions and troubles ought to 
make a man sweet-hearted instead of 
sour-tempered. 

671. Trial Tests Men. — If you do 
not bring any strain to bear upon tim- 
ber, one kind is as good as another. 
A splinter of a broom is as good as 
the best ash or hickory if you do not 
put any weight upon it — if you lay it 
down on the carpet and do nothing 
with it. And when men are tried in 
life what they are is made to appeal-. 

672. Trouble a Test of Friendship. 
— How adversity does test ! What a 
touch-stone trouble is ! How many 
when you were on the crest of the 
wave were friendly to you ! But 
when you went down in the trough of 
the sea, where were they ? Not one 
could be seen. Much of the friend- 
ship of Hfe is kindly, is good-natured ; 
but there is a vast amount of friendli- 
ness that is merely a net set to catch 
your praise. It is friendship for the 
interest of one alone, and not for the 
mutual interest of both. Therefore it 
is said, " Let love be without dissimu- 
lation." Do not pretend to love when 
you do not. Let friendship be real. 

673. Child Training and Christian 
Training. — That child is the best 
brought up who knows some care, 
who has felt some responsibility, and 
who has been trained and taught, as 
he has gone along, how to take 
trouble, and overcome it. And our 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



153 



Father's disposition is to deal with us 
in the same general way. He puts 
upon us pain and penalty, for the 
very sake of bringing us to behold 
that which is in us. 

674. Brave Bearing of Trouble. — A 
soldier was not born for soft parade ; 
he was born for the camp, for the 
onset, for the fierce endeavor, for 
wounds, for the hospital, — not for 
whining in any of them, but for say- 
ing, " I am man enough to bear it 
all." Everybody admires that hero- 
ism. We admire it in each other ; 
and do you suppose that God does 
not admire it in us ? 

675. God's Care of His Children. — 
When a father teaches his boy to 
swim he puts him into the water, and 
stands by him with a hand that is 
ready to sustain him if he begins to 
sink. The father does not propose to 
help the boy so long as he can help 
himself, because his object is to teach 
him to rely upon the exertion of his 
own powers, but if he is in danger of 
sinking he will catch him. There is a 
Father's hand in every man's affairs. 
If there is one truth taught in the New 
Testament more than another it is 
that there is a Providence that takes 
care of men when they cannot take 
care of themselves. 

676. Nobility in Adversity. — There 
used to be a magnificent style of 
chivalry among the Southern gentle- 
men. I think of it now, and wish 
there was more of it in the North. 
There was a personal courage and a 
social nobility and refinement about 
them which everybody ought to ad- 
mire — and I do admire it ; but I never 
admired their grace of manner, their 
conversation and their high chivairic 
bearing half so much as 1 have ad- 
mired the conduct, in innumerable 
cases among them that I have known, 
and about which others have informed 



me, of men who since the Civil War 
have gone down from eminence and 
affluence to absolute obscurity and 
destitution without a tear, without a 
murmur, without a particle of discon- 
tent, and are taking whatever comes 
to them from day to day, and waiting, 
with uplifted eye, until their change 
comes. 

677. God's Dealings. — If you have 
trouble it is a sign and token that God 
is doing something with you. He is 
digging a well in you out of which is 
to come the water of life. He is sink- 
ing a shaft in you because the gold 
lies so deep that it otherwise will never 
be got out. He is using the flail ; 
that is the only way of separating the 
grain from the straw. He lays you 
out in the dew, as it were ; for it is 
not until every fiber of wrong that is 
in you is rotted that you can produce 
the fine linen of righteousness. At 
every single step he is leading you to 
a nobler manhood ; to the very sub- 
stance of being ; to more strength to 
endure. 

678. Remnants of Life. — In the 
summer when the wind blew the 
leaves sang. But the time came 
when they had lost their hold on the 
tree and dropped. And now, when 
the wind blew, the leaves no longer 
made melody in their motion. Before, 
when the wind came, they hung sweet 
and succulent and green on the tree, 
but now they whirled in wreaths past 
the house, some falling into a little de- 
pression ; some nestling by the side 
of the fence ; some falling under a 
bank ; some along the hedge. Brown, 
sapless, withered leaves, they were, 
good for nothing except to make soil 
for another year. I have seen a great 
many men in life that were wind- 
blown ; and they held on to the stalk 
and the branch ; and all the wind 
could do was to make them sing : but 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



now I see that they are broken off 
from the tree. It is November with 
them ; and the wind catches them, 
and whirls them away, and some land 
in poor-houses, some in hospitals, and 
some in private dwellings, where they 
pick up chips, or do some other inferior 
service. They are remnants of life. 
And it is a very great sadness. 

679. Courage Under Failure. — 
There is a great deal of what is called 
" submitting to the will of God " that 
is the poorest kind of piety. Do not 
think that because you are thirty-five 
years old, and all your endeavors thus 
far have failed, and it seems to be the 
will of God that you should be a use- 
less man, that you will submit, and 
seek to spend the rest of your life in 
some quiet seclusion. Oh, you lazy 
one ! Do you suppose that God is 
proud of such submission and of such 
children as that ? He tingles you 
with events, not to make you give up, 
but to make you wake up. Be young 
until you die, so far as energy, per- 
sistence, ambition, and augmentation 
of resources are concerned ! There 
are some things that curl over easily 
in the autumn. Their leaves become 
sear and yellow, and fall to the ground 
before there are any signs of frost in 
the air. I do not like such vege- 
tables ; I do not have them in my 
garden. Others carry their green 
leaves clean down into freezing be- 
fore they give up. These I like. And 
I like to see men that can look at 
God's frosts and not be blighted, but 
remain green, and succulent, and 
growing, even into the edges of 
winter. 

680. Commercial Death and Resur- 
rection. — Of the men that have been 
considered worthy of an inscription, I 
think you will find that ninety-nine 
out of every hundred have seen one 
or two or three periods during their 



life when the world said that it was all 
up with them, and threw its pall over 
them. But there was resurrection 
under the pall. Determined not to 
die, they rose to their feet again. 

There is but one bankruptcy that 
should make a man lie still, and that 
is the one in which the sexton is his 
executor, and settles his estate. 

681. Borrowing Trouble. — Never 
cry about a trouble until God brings it 
to you, and puts it on you. Then you 
will find that with the troubles comes 
the preparation, so that they cease to 
be troubles. Livingstone, the traveler, 
describes, in one of his letters, his ex- 
perience when he was struck down by 
a lion. He testifies that, when he was 
set upon and borne down by a lion's 
spring, and seized in his jaws, and 
dragged by him, from the moment 
that he was struck by the lion's paw, 
all fear and all trouble left him. It 
was a dream of peace with him. His 
intellect remained, and he supposed 
that he was about to be killed ; but 
he seemed to be under a magnetic 
charm, until he was rescued by the 
fidelity of one of his attendants. And 
that which he found to be true in the 
case of a literal lion, thousands of 
men have felt in the moral kingdom. 
When the lion that they feared in the 
way set upon them, God either stopped 
his mouth, or rendered the stroke of 
his paw painless. 

682. Imaginary Troubles. — Many 
people take their troubles by the 
imagination. More than half we suf- 
fer through fear of troubles, is that 
which we are made to suffer by 
magnifying them. You suffer ten 
times as much in thinking about hav- 
ing your tooth drawn as you do in 
having it drawn. We take our 
troubles, and turn them over, and 
look at them ; we imagine what form 
they will assume under such and such 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



155 



circumstances ; we make an inventory 
of them ; we muster them, and call 
the roll, and put them in order, and 
march them first this way and then 
that ; we annoy ourselves with them 
as much as possible. Although there 
are such things as troubles, generally 
speaking those things that hurt are 
things that we do not imagine are 
going to hurt. When grief puts its 
harness on a man, the place where it 
rubs and binds is not where there are 
pads, but where there are no pads ; 
the place where it bears heavily is 
where he made no provision for it. 

683. Persistent Troubles. — When 
brooks flow from the mountains, 
though as they begin to go down they 
move gently and smoothly and 
sweetly, yet when at last they come to 
the chasm, the waters plunge down 
suddenly to the bottom, and, finding 
no outlet, whirl round and round, 
and, .seizing a rock which happens 
to be there, turn it over and over per- 
petually, and wear the place deeper 
and deeper, so that it never becomes 
dry. And it is troubles which roll 
about in men's souls that dig deep 
places in them which even in the 
droughts of summer never are dry. 

684. Escape from Trouble. — When 
birds are flying over, and the fowler 
lies in wait for them, if they fly low, at 
every discharge of the fowler's gun, 
some fall, some are wounded, and 
some, swerving sideways, plunge into 
the thicket and hide themselves. But 
you will find that immediately after 
the first discharge of the gun, the 
flock rise and fly higher ; and at the 
next discharge they rise again, and 
fly still higher. And not many times 
has the plunging shot thinned their 
number, before they take so high a 
level that it is in vain that the fowler 
aims at them, because they are above 
the reach of his shot. 



When troubles come upon you, fly 
higher. And if they still strike you, 
fly still higher. And by and by you 
will rise so high in the spiritual life, 
and your affections will be set on 
things so entirely above, that these 
troubles cannot touch you. 

685. Seek Higher Things. — I know 
all about Western rivers in times of 
flood, having lived on the banks of 
one of them. I know what it is to see 
fifteen miles of water where ordinarily 
there is not more than a quarter of a 
mile. I have seen steamboats running 
right through the main streets of a 
town. I have seen settlers, warned 
by the old inhabitants, build their 
cabin on higher ground, and I have 
seen persons living lower down driven 
by the flood, first from the ground- 
floor to the next, and then to the next, 
being compelled to go higher and 
higher, until finally they were obliged 
to abandon their homes and go in a 
skiff to some point of safety. They 
said, after going through this experi- 
ence, " You will never find me building 
on low land again." And God says 
to many men, " You have built too 
low. Build again, and build higher." 

686. Forward ; not Backward. — 
Once, when I was a lad, I undertook 
to swim across Charles River, and got 
halfway across it, when some strange 
sensation, arising from a boy's morbid 
fear of cramping, took possession of 
me. It was a great feat to swim 
across, and one that I never accom- 
plished ; for having that fear I swam 
back, forgetting that it was just as far 
to one side as to the other! Many 
persons carry themselves far across 
the stream of difficulty, and then, 
on meeting some impediment and 
check, swim back again ; whereas 
the same effort, the same exertion of 
thought and feeling, would carry 
them to the other side. 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



687. Beautiful Surrender. — In what- 
ever way events make known the will 
of God to you, and wherever you are, 
remember, do not give up until you 
are compelled to : but when you do 
give up, do it thoroughly ; do it 
sweetly ; do it beautifully. It is said 
that on the battle-field some die in 
rage, and lie with clenched fists, with 
passion apparent in their faces. 
Others, that in the conflict carried 
themselves with magnificent powers, 
in death lie with smiles upon their 
faces, as if they had died dreaming 
sweet dreams of home, even amid the 
horror of the battle around them. 
When you fall in the conflict of life, 
do not die gnarled and strife-marked, 
but with the look of resignation on 
your face. If you are overthrown, 
you then know what God's will is. 
Don't give up before ; but give up 
then, and do it like a tfian. 

688. A Firm Hope. — It is quite in 
vain for any of us to have a hope in 
God which is valid only in the fair 
hour of prosperity and of health. No 
anchor is of any use whatsoever to a 
ship that cannot by its cable go down 
to take hold of the firm bottom, and 
that, taking hold of it, is not able to 
keep the ship. If when the wave 
beats, if when the whole concentrated 
fury of the storm beats on the ship, 
the anchor holds it, that is an anchor 
worth having. 

689. Transient Troubles. — As to all 
those apparent contradictions and ca- 
cophonies that exist in human life, by 
and by, when the evil is removed, we 
shall see that there is a use in them ; 
and, as in some of Beethoven's sym- 
phonies, there are passages that rasp 
the ear and that quiver the very foun- 
dations on which we stand, but are 
like gorges, which open out into val- 
leys of beauty, made more beautiful 
by the contrast ; so, by and by, in 



another life, we shall see that the 
things that in this life seemed such 
hard things were working out results 
that were beneficent and beautiful. 

690. Bearing Present Troubles. — 
I have always been peculiarly subject 
to seasickness ; and when, upon the 
ocean, I was going abroad, with my 
imagination dazzled by all the won- 
ders of the Old World, I lay in my 
berth scarcely able to stir, wilted and 
worthless. I knew there were ten 
days between New York and Liver- 
pool, and I said to myself, " Are you 
willing to take these ten days of 
nausea and universal disgust for the 
sake of the three months of exquisite 
joy you will have on the other side ? " 
I never was so seasick but that I was 
deliberately willing to pay the price. 
I said, " This is about as bad as any- 
thing can well be in this world, but 
for the sake of that which is beyond 
it I will take even this." 

691. Sweetness in Adversity. — To 
be able to stand and bear the ills and 
the adversities of life and yet blossom 
in the midst of them is a rare quality, 
the example of which the church 
needs. I remember when in Switzer- 
land plucking flowers on the dripping 
edge of the glaciers ; and no flower 
grown in a tropical garden ever 
seemed half so beautiful to my eye 
as those that were blossoming in the 
midst of winter — as it were, defying it. 

692. Hardness in Life. — What ! 
You are surrounded with trouble ; 
you are surrounded with difficulties; 
you are mortified and disappointed 
every day, and know not that it is the 
voice of God to you ? 

What would you have thought if a 
recruit, on being sent down to the 
Army of the Potomac, had cried the 
first day because he could not get any 
plum-pudding ; and on the second 
day because his clothes were torn, and 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



157 



he had no one to sew them up ; and 
on the third day because he had to 
march farther than he wanted to ? 
They take such weaknesses out of 
boys pretty quickly in the army. 

There are men in God's army suffer- 
ing what all soldiers suffer, depriva- 
tion and hardship on every side ; the 
missiles of the enemy come hurling 
in, asking no leave. But by life's 
battle there is being wrought out in 
them a nobler manhood, an enfran- 
chised will, a purified courage, a 
sweeter resignation, an invisible trust 
in God, a divinely-kindled manhood. 

693. Sainthood in Poverty. — There 
are probably a good many saints that 
go out of our churches ; but I think 
there are a great many more going 
out of our hospitals, and not a few 
out of our poor-houses, and a great 
many out of the lower walks of life. 
If the angels of God were to come 
and gather up those that in distress 
and poverty and suffering have main- 
tained a holy faith and a godly life 
and example, they would garner first 
from the bottom of society, and last, 
and with the smallest sheaves, from 
the top of society. " For the last 
shall be first, and the first last." 

694. Long-Suffering. — What the 
castle is, where there is light within, 
where there is fire on the hearth, 
where all is joy, while the winter 
scowls and beats and flails the outside, 
that may be said to be the soul of a 
man who is built so high and with 
such thick and secure walls that ex- 
ternal things can afflict him but little. 
Long-suffering — what a glorious at- 
tribute it is to us ! What an armor ! 

695. Outward and Inward Riches. — 
A man may be a pauper inwardly 
though everything he touches turns to 
gold ; but a man may be a pauper 
outwardly and rich as a king inside. 
It is a great achievement, therefore, 



to know how to take coarse surround- 
ings, unfavorable circumstances, and 
limited means, and so use them as to 
build one's self up inwardly. 

695. The Real Man. — It is with a 
man as it is with corn. You may 
take away the stalk, but that is not 
the corn ; you may strip all the husks, 
one after another, and yet the corn 
has lost nothing. The kernel re- 
mains, and that is the corn. The 
stalk and husks are good to protect 
the corn, and carry the sap to it while 
it is growing ; but when it is grown 
they are of no use to it. And a man 
has lost nothing when his surround- 
ings are taken away. 

697, Trouble Shows Character. — 
When a truly great man has his 
worldly possessions taken away from 
him, it is as when a cocoanut has the 
shell and rind taken off from it. Take 
a man who is good and noble and true, 
and remove from him everything 
through which he has stood and 
glowed and radiated, and men will 
bow down to him, and say, " That is 
virtue ! That is godliness ! That is 
God in the soul ! " And the man will 
be more known, more felt, more re- 
vered, when standing merely in his 
own intrinsic wealth, than when clothed 
with the trappings of this world. 

698. Moral Worth of Frugality. — 
A frugal and economical man is self- 
governing. His eye begs him every 
day, and he says, to his eye, "No." 
His ear pleads every day for indul- 
gence, and he says, " No." His 
tongue supplicates him, saying, " In- 
dulge me, indulge me ; " and he says, 
" Thou must be obedient. Thou shalt 
not have this." Every inch of his 
skin pleads for some license; and he 
says, " No." And amusements say, 
" Give us the day; " and he says, " I 
will not spare the day." Pleasures 
and temptations of various kinds, a 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



thousand influences, come round a 
man, beseeching him to gratify their 
demands ; and he says, " I have laid 
out my plan, and I will not depart 
from it. I will save." There is a 
continuous process of self-government 
going on within him. This may be 
carried too far, and become miserish; 
but that is an abuse of a good thing: 
and in this habit of frugality and 
economy there is a world of moral 
benefit. 

699. Inequalities of Condition. — If 
a party of men that are crossing the 
continent to become rich in California 
are assured that every one of them 
shall be the possessor, in five years, of 
one million dollars, the differences be- 
tween them are annihilated while they 
are going across. One may have 
twenty-five dollars in his pocket, an- 
other a hundred, and another five 
hundred ; one may have almost no 
conveniences, another may have con- 
veniences enough to barely make him 
comfortable, and another may have 
all the conveniences that the heart 
could wish ; and yet, if they are as- 
sured of the fortune ahead, they do 
not care for these inequalities. And 
let the promises of God rest on the 
poor man's lot ; let him feel comforted 
by the thought that God is imparting 
his favor to him ; let him look upon 
his crosses and troubles as to be fol- 
lowed by unspeakable blessings, and 
he forgets the inequalities between his 
condition and that of other men, and 
no longer thinks himself unfortunate. 

700. Business Depression Demoral- 
izing. — Periods of depression demoral- 
ize the national conscience. Few 
fungi attack trees in vigorous health. 
It is when the tree grows weak and 
organizes its supplies slowly that moss, 
lichen and insects assail it. Out of 
national weakness come innumerable 
temptations. 



701. Evils of Poverty.— As God 
has organized human affairs, wealth is 
indispensable to the elevation of na- 
tions ; and though wealth is not the 
most important thing, it is not to be 
argued against. The old notions of 
the intrinsic benefits of poverty are 
exploded. 

Poverty accepted for a moral end, 
however, may become a very great 
power. A Moravian missionary at- 
tempted to preach to West India 
slaves, but their life was so wretched, 
as the result of the oppression of white 
men, that they would not hear a white 
man preach, and he saw that, in the 
relation which he sustained to them, it 
would be impossible for him to benefit 
them. So he sold himself into slavery 
among them, and came home at night 
from the tasks of the day feeling the 
same weariness that they felt ; and 
then they would open their ears and 
hear his consolations in Jesus Christ. 
Such servitude was noble. Such 
poverty was admirable. It was a 
literal verification of the example of 
the Saviour. Therefore, there are 
circumstances where poverty may be 
accepted as a means of doing good. 
But poverty is praiseworthy only 
where it has a distinct moral end, and 
where there is voluntariness in it. It 
does not follow that the next man who 
is poor, because he does not know 
how to get rich, is to be commended 
for his poverty. Poor-houses are not 
the best places in which to get impres- 
sions of religion and morality. Pov- 
erty is an evil, both to the individual 
and to the community. 

702. A Ruined Man. — We say a 
man is " ruined." Are his wife and 
children dead? O, no. Have they 
had a quarrel and are separated from 
him ? O, no. Has he lost his reputa- 
tion through crime ? No. Is his rea- 
son gone ? No, it is as sound as ever. 



POVERTY AND ADVERSITY 



159 



Is he struck through with disease? 
No. He has lost his property, and so 
he is "ruined." The 7nan ruined! 
When shall we learn that " a man's 
life consisteth not in the abundance of 
the things which he possesseth " ? 

703. Soul-Bankruptcy. — I have 
seen men, that had lived with a great 
circuit of prosperity, disbranched by 
commercial revulsions, who yet stood, 
in adversity, nobler, riper, better than 
ever they were with all their environ- 
ments of wealth. And I have seen 
persons who have come to bankruptcy, 
and sold their houses, and their mu- 
sical instruments, and their very cra- 
dles, and were stripped of everything 
without ; but, oh, woe ! that was as 
nothing to the bankruptcy within. 
All courage gone ; all hope gone ; 
all faith gone ; no sweetness ; no 
love ; no trust ; only whining, queru- 
lous despondency ! Of all bankrupt- 
cies in the world, that of a man's soul 
and disposition is the most pitiful. 

704. A Primary Cause of Poverty. — 
A man who can only work and not 
think, is not the equal in any regard 
of the man who can think, who 
can plan, who can combine, and 
who can live not for to-day alone 
but for to-morrow, for next month, 
for the next year, for ten years. 
This is the man whose volume will 
just as surely weigh down that of 
the unthinking man, as a ton will 
weigh down a pound in the scale. 
Avoirdupois is moral, industrial, as 
well as material, in this respect ; and 
the primary cause therefore of unpros- 
perity in industrial callings hes in the 
want of intelligence, either in the 
slender endowment of the man, or, 
more likely, the want of education in 
his ordinary and average endowment. 

705. Other Men's Prosperity. — Has 
God defrauded you because he has 
dealt bountifully with other men ? If 



I give one beggar a penny, and pass 
by the next one without giving him 
anything, do I cheat the one to whom 
I give nothing? 

706. Unnoted Tragedies. — In a 
grog-shop two bullies quarrel ; one 
shoots the other, and does not shoot 
himself; and the next morning there 
is news of an " awful tragedy." Or, 
some half-maniac poisons a whole 
family ; and the event is described as 
a "great tragedy." But the most ex- 
quisite, the most cunningly-woven, 
tragedies are those which happen 
every day without note or comment, 
where there is sudden revolution and 
change from confidence and abun- 
dance to despair and destitution in the 
household. Children are scattered, 
and the smiling eye becomes a foun- 
tain of tears. These are tragedies 
compared with which none that are 
recorded in books have a right to hve. 

707. Profitable Losses. — An inex- 
perienced young miser, we will sup- 
pose, inherits the Almaden mine. 
Great heaps of ore are thrown out, and 
he goes and looks at it, and says, " I 
am a mountain rich." He gives di- 
rections to have this ore prepared for 
market. The laborers take it and 
throw it into the furnace ; and he 
watches the process with greedy eye, 
saying, " What ! putting my precious 
quicksilver in the fire?" As it be- 
gins to melt, and flow out, and grow 
less and less, he is appalled to see 
how it is wasting away. But the men 
that smelt it laugh, and say, "You 
have lost nothing ; you have gained 
by as much as it has shrunk ; for it 
was nothing but ore, and nine-tenths 
of it was good for nothing, and that 
which was good was so tied up that it 
could not serve you at all. It was 
necessary that you should lose nine- 
tenths of it in order that you might 
have the benefit of the other tenth." 



i6o 



SOCIAL LIFE 



In this life, that which seems to men 
to be wasted and destroyed is fre- 
quently that which they can better 
afford to lose than to keep. 

708. Earthly Losses Insignificant, — 
I suppose Mr. Astor carries no more 
money with him each day than is 
necessary for the incidental expenses 
of that day. If some pickpocket re- 
lieves him of his wallet down town, 
and he puts his hand in his pocket to 
pay for a small purchase, he feels a 
moment's vexation to think that some 
miserable fellow has been keener than 
he, and taken his money. But it was 
only twenty-five or fifty dollars, and 
what is that to an Astor, who might 
have a bank on every street in New 
York, if he chose. He says, " Let it 
go." He has plenty of money, and 
what to him is the loss of that little 
matter ? So, where a man has his 
treasures laid up in heaven, suppose 



he does suffer inconveniences here 
and there, suppose his pocket is 
picked of this or that little pleasure, 
does he sit down and cry about it ? 

709. God's Heirs not Poor. — You 
may be poor as poverty here ; but ah ! 
God's sons are not poor. 

It is inconvenient for an heir that is 
traveling in Europe, to find, when he 
gets to Paris, that the vessel bearing 
his letters has gone down, and that he 
is among strangers without a penny in 
his pocket. Nevertheless, it is mirth- 
ful and ludicrous ; and he says, 
" Here am I, worth half a million, 
and I have not enough by me to pay 
my landlady." And he makes a 
shift, as best he can, to live, till inter- 
course is reestabhshed between himself 
and his agents, and he can lay hold of 
his possessions. A man can make 
himself feel that he is rich in this life, 
because of his relations to the other. 



XVII. FAULTS AND VICES 



710. Habits Revealed. — We are con- 
tinually denying that we have habits 
which we have been practising all our 
hfe. Here is a man that has lived 
forty or fifty years, and a chance sen- 
tence or word lances him, and reveals 
to him a trait which he has always 
possessed, but which until now he had 
not the remotest idea that he pos- 
sessed. For forty or fifty years he 
has been fooling himself about a 
matter as plain as his hand before his 
face. 

711. Small Beginnings. — Faults are 
often stepping-stones to heinous sins. 
A very slight equivocation or careless- 
ness in truth-telling will lead by and 
by to the gravest temptations towards 
falsehood. This is the reason that the 
Master says, " He that is faithful in 
that which is least, is faithful also in 
much." 



712. Small Faults Baits to Larger 
Ones. — Small faults are baits and toles 
to draw men up to greater ones, so 
that their mischief is not measured by 
their own diameter, but by that which 
they lead to. Foolish birds are the 
turkeys, that never lift up their heads 
when they are feeding, and never let 
them down when they are not. So, in 
the West, men are accustomed to 
select a sort of slope, or side hill, and 
cut a little channel, or path, and hedge 
it up with a kind of rail-fence without 
roof or any protection. Along this 
path they strew corn. And the wild 
turkeys come in flocks and pick up 
the corn, following the path, and do 
not look up to see where they are 
being led to till they have passed under 
the lower rail, and got into the en- 
closure ; and then, there being no 
corn there, they hft up their heads, 



FAULTS AND VICES 



161 



and see where they are. They cannot 
fly over the fence (a turkey cannot 
rise on his wings unless he has a 
chance to run), and they cannot get 
out unless they lower their heads, and 
that they will not do ; and so they are 
caught. 

Of thousands of faults men say, 
"This is not much." No, it is not 
much ; but it is laid along your path in 
such a way [that the first thing you 
know you will find yourself surrounded 
by a pen of dishonesty from which you 
cannot creep nor fly out. Faults may 
lead to things that are worse. 

713. Repeated Faults Dim Moral 
Sight. — One of these weaving spiders, 
perhaps, is in my window, and sets 
about making his house there. He 
does not seem to amount to much ; but 
he has a power that is not to be de- 
spised. If I were to say that that little 
speck of a spider was an antagonist of 
the sun, and that it would beat him, 
you would laugh me to scorn ; but it 
is so. For presently he has a brood 
of spiders — five hundred of them — and 
they set to work to spin their webs, 
and run them from side to side, from 
top to bottom, and from corner to 
corner ; and by and by the window is 
covered all over. And particles of 
dust, flying through the air, settle on 
it, and fill up the little spaces between 
the threads. And after a while the 
spiders spin other webs and cover over 
the first ones. And the dust settles on 
these. And in a year, let the sun get 
through that window if he can ! Big 
as he is, and strong as he is, the 
spider is more than a match for him. 

So a multitude of httle faults obscure 
moral sight, and dim a man's outlook, 
and substantially put out his eyes, so 
that he cannot see. Although each 
one of them is very small, they are very 
effective. Beware of faults that tend 
to reproduce themselves continually. 



714. Little Faults. — You need not 
break the glasses of a telescope, or 
coat them over with paint, in order to 
prevent you from seeing through 
them. Just breathe upon them, and 
the dew of your breath will shut 
out all the stars. So it does not re- 
quire great crimes to hide the light of 
God's countenance. Little faults can 
do it just as well. Take a shield and 
cast a spear upon it, and it will leave 
in it one great dent. Prick it all over 
with a million little needle shafts and 
they will take the polish from it far 
more than the piercing of the spear. 
It is not so much the great sins which 
take the freshness from our con- 
sciences, as the numberless petty 
faults which we are all the while com- 
mitting. 

715. Petty Sins. — We do well to 
remember that a little tooth, which is 
almost too small for the microscope, 
may nevertheless be large enough to 
cut one thread, and another thread, 
and another thread ; and when you 
have begun to cut threads, you have 
begun to make holes ; and when you 
have begun to make holes, the de- 
struction of the garment is at hand ; 
and a character that is moth-eaten, 
that has begun to be pierced by 
petty sins and vices, is weakened, 
and is being prepared for destruc- 
tion. 

716. Small Meannesses. — Amanis, 
as it were, a cask of wine. A worm 
gnaws through a stave. It is a small 
worm, not half so large around as a 
knitting-needle. The moment he 
conies to the wine he draws out his 
head, — for worms are not so fond of 
wine as men are ! — and a drop follows 
him, — only a drop. Another worm, 
on the other side of the cask, gnaws 
through another stave. He gets a 
drop, and draws back. On each end 
there are a dozen or twenty other 



l62 



SOCIAL LIFE 



worms eating their way to the wine. 
Not one of them is as big as a mite ; 
but fifty or sixty of them together, if 
each makes a hole large enough to 
allow a drop to pass through it, are 
sufficient to cause the waste of all the 
precious contents of the cask. After 
the lapse of a day, a week, a month, 
or six months, the vintner goes to see 
his treasure ; and behold, the cask 
sounds empty as a hypocrite's heart ! 
There is not a drop in it. And yet it 
looks like a cask of wine. Where 
have the contents gone ? Not one 
pint has been surreptitiously drawn by 
the servant that gets blamed, or by 
the thief that the vintner accuses with- 
out knowing who he is. The wine has 
all leaked out at holes not large 
enough to admit of the discharge of 
more than one drop at a time. 

Now, ten million little meannesses, 
selfishnesses, pettishnesses, waspish 
dispositions, pierce and puncture the 
heart, and all its graces are drawn out. 
You are empty because you leak all 
over! 

717. Little Lies. — Men think that a 
great black lie is very culpable. I 
suppose it is. But when an armorer 
wishes, by scouring, to cut the very 
surface of metal down, what does he 
do ? Take a bar of iron and rub it ? 
No ; he takes emery. Its particles 
are as small as a pin's point ; and 
these he puts on ; and by scouring he 
cuts down the surface — takes off the 
enamel. You think that a great lie is 
a great sin, and a great shame to a 
man ; but after all, little lies are more 
dangerous, because there are so many 
of them ; and because each one of 
them is diamond-pointed. And these 
petty untruths which are so small that 
you do not notice them, and so nu- 
merous that you cannot estimate 
them, are the ones that take off the 
very enamel of the moral sense. 



718. Dangerous Lies. — A lie always 
needs a truth for a handle to it, else 
the hand would cut itself which sought 
to drive it home upon another. The 
worst lies, therefore, are those whose 
blade is false, but whose handle is true. 

719. Half-Truths. — He is consid- 
ered a blunderer, nowadays, who tells 
a lie. He ouglit to tell the truth so 
that it shall tell the lie. It is a matter 
of dexterity. The throwing of a 
shadow is enough. Men throw shad- 
ows on people's paths, and produce 
certain impressions on their minds ; 
and then when they are arraigned for 
having made this or that misstate- 
ment, they say, " I did not say so. I 
never said any such thing. If you 
understood me so, that is your look- 
out." Men really trap each other by 
half-truths. Half-truths are the devil's 
whole lies. 

720. Truth-Telling. — Men have an 
impression that truth, pure and un- 
adulterated, is like twenty-two carat 
gold, too soft to wear ordinarily, and 
that it must be adulterated to about 
eighteen carat, and then it is tough 
enough to go. They say a judicious 
mixture between a truth and a lie is 
the true currency, and they do not be- 
lieve in truth. On no subject in this 
world is there a greater lack of faith 
than as to truth. It is not necessary 
that a man should always tell every- 
thing ; but whatever he tells, it is nec- 
essary that that should always be 
truth. 

721. Unseen Faults. — Faults, often- 
times, are like mines with which men 
blow up bastions and towers of fortifi- 
cations. Afar off, they by whom the 
work is done break ground, and hid- 
den and unseen they dig until they 
have carried the mine under the foun- 
dation. The occupants of the place 
know not what is going on till the last 
moment, when the tower leaps into the 



FAULTS AND VICES 



163 



air, as if it were filled with life, and 
that which before was a strong de- 
fence is a heap of ruins. I know men 
who have a mine laid right under the 
curtain-wall, which only awaits the 
day and hour when it shall be fired. 

722. Moral Deterioration. — The 
course of some men's morals is like 
the course of their raiment. If a man 
is careful, and repairs his raiment, it 
will last a long time ; but if he is heed- 
less, spots will begin to come here and 
there upon it, and from time to time it 
will become ripped and torn, and, if 
he has no careful wife to take care of 
him, and takes none of himself, his 
coat, in a month, will be indecent, for 
want of attention. And men's inside 
raiment is worse than their outside. 
Many a man has a decent coat that 
has not decent linen. And that anal- 
ogy may be carried further in. A 
man that is clean of body may be 
filthy in soul. Men fall little byhttle. 
Selfishness leads them to do this or 
that thing that is low, they become 
coarser and coarser in their thoughts 
and imaginations, and gradually they 
come to look at things from a more 
worldly point of view. They lose the 
romantic ; they lose the inspiration of 
pure and spiritual things; they nibble 
at positive vices. 

723. Reclamation of Evil Traits. — 
The engineer, by striking channels 
through the low, level morass, where 
nothing thrives but noisome reptiles 
and insects, can drain it and make it 
capable of yielding luxuriant growths 
useful to men. And a man may sub- 
soil and drain himself. 

724. Eradicating Bad Habits. — The 
difficulty of grubbing up blackberry 
bushes is that you cannot get at them 
on account of the number of them. 
There are big ones, but they are sur- 
rounded with little ones ; and if you 
attempt to reach in with the pruning- 



hook, you get scratched and torn, be- 
sides failing in the attempt. You need 
to begin at the outside, and cut and 
grub away the little ones ; and when 
you have done that, you can whack 
at the big ones. And so it is with 
many habits. If men attempt to touch 
those habits first which are far in, 
which are in complicity with wicked- 
ness, they are torn and scratched with 
little ones. But if a man overcomes a 
small habit, he takes the first step to- 
wards getting at the bigger ones. 

725. Pertinacity of Bad Habits. — 
When I lived in the West I used to 
see the houses of many men without 
cellars and built low down on the 
ground ; and the swine were inti- 
mately acquainted with the whole 
family ; and the chickens ran in and 
out, and in again ; and the good 
housewife would busy herself here and 
there every minute, shoo-shooing after 
the chickens, and going out with broom 
to drive away the swine that were root- 
ing at the door. 

There are fowls of bad repute and 
swine round about the habitation of a 
man that has been brought up in 
worldliness ; and while he is trying to 
do his duty here they do damage 
there ; and while he is driving them 
out in that direction they are rushing 
in in this direction. When a man be- 
gins to live a higher, nobler hfe, O, 
what a plague his old hfe becomes to 
him! He didn't think or care until he 
undertook to see about it. 

726. Indolence Poisonous. — The 
mischief of indolence is like that of 
standing water, not that it does not 
run, but that, not running, it corrupts, 
and, corrupting, breeds poisonous 
miasma, so that they who hve in the 
neighborhood inhale disease at every 
breath. 

727. Heedlessness. — If all the small 
carelessnesses of one's life were to be 



164 



SOCIAL LIFE 



brought logctlicr into one view, it 
would not only amaze the subject of 
them, but it would be difficult to per- 
suade any one that he was ever care- 
ful at all. The words too many, the 
things superfluous, the things for- 
gotten, the things done bunglingly, 
the absolute mistakes, the time wasted 
in doing over aright things done 
wrong, the waste of force by indirec- 
tion, by bad aim, by ill-judged in- 
tensity, if it could every day be 
summed up, and presented as a 
whole, would take the conceit, it is to 
be hoped, out of self-satisfied men. 

If one considers the human mind as 
a collection of exquisite tools, and 
watches their use, specially or gen- 
erally, he cannot but feel that the 
average man is a most unskillful, be- 
cause heedless bungler. 

728. Carelessness a Crime. — There 
are circumstances in which heedless- 
ness amounts to crime, to malfeasance, 
or to a violation of trust ; and yet 
there are many persons who, while 
tliey feel that a positive violation of 
the rights of property would be 
wrong, speak lightly of carelessness. 
This is a fault whose roots, if they are 
not cut, grow deeper and deeper. 

729. Neglect. — The faithful ship- 
master who is bringing a thousand 
passengers over the deep gives neither 
sleep to his eyes nor slumber to his 
eyelids ; by night and by day he 
watches the sea, and studies the signs 
of the weather, that he may not be 
surprised by wind or storm ; he is 
constantly vigilant ; he well-nigh frets 
his life out, in order that he may 
bring his precious cargo safe to the 
port. If, on the other hand, he were 
careless, if he neglected his duty, and 
the vessel struck some iceberg, or was 
overtaken unprepared by some whirl- 
wind or driving storm, and went down 
with all its living freight, do you sup- 



pose he would rise out of the flood in 
the judgment-day without any re- 
sponsibility for all the mischiefs that 
came from simple neglect ? 

730. Indirect Guilt. — Wickedness 
which a man can prevent, and which 
he does not prevent, inculpates him. 
Men are responsible for the mischief 
which they could hinder. If you put 
the torch to your neighbor's house, 
you are guilty in one way ; but if an- 
other puts the torch to that house, 
and you go by, and see the flames, 
and say, " It is not my business ; I 
did not kindle that fire ; and, besides, 
he is an enemy of mine," you are as 
culpable as if you had set fire to the 
house yourself. 

731. Impatience in Personal Career. 
— The ambitions of youth, the far 
reach! ngs before we are prepared for 
manhood, need patience. Most spend 
thirty years of life wishing they were 
old, and the last thirty wishing they 
were not ; and so the world goes on. 
When we enter upon earlier life, we 
are aspiring, but we aspire for qual- 
ities or for conditions which, in them- 
selves, imply unfolding. Peter says 
somewhere, that the husbandman is 
not in a hurry. He sows his seed and 
patiently waits for the harvest. We 
sow our seed and do not wait. We 
expect our wheat to come up as a 
mushroom comes up — the next morn- 
ing. Men in early life, by their 
impetuosity, by ignorance of the 
nature of the qualities which they de- 
sire, and their relation to the time, 
and the difficulty of unfolding, rush 
upon enterprises and into conditions 
where they are balked. 

732. Desultory Action. — There are 
many who diligently occupy them- 
selves without aim. A thousand little 
doings disconnected from each other 
are no more a wise building up of life 
than the laying of a thousand bricks 



FAULTS AND VICES 



i6i 



in a thousand difterent places would 
be the building up of a house. 

733. Unprofitable Energy. — A man 
is like an unbroken colt, that, if he 
cannot go, champs his bit, and froths 
at the mouth. Many a horse spends 
as much energy, wastes himself as 
much, dancing up and down without 
any travel, as would be needed for a 
two days' journey. And there is that 
kind of untrained, unsubdued energy 
in men. There are many who can- 
not do a thing profitably because they 
do it fretfully. 

734. The Soul's Evil Engines. — 
Did you ever go through the London 
Tower, to see the machines of cruelty 
of fontjer ages that are on exhibition 
there ? Have you ever seen the vast 
collection of weapons of defence and 
offence there deposited ? Did you 
ever go through the Springfield 
armory to see the weapons for the de- 
struction of human life that are there 
piled high and bright and multitudi- 
nous? Let me take you through a 
more wonderful magazine — a maga- 
zine where ai-ms are to be found more 
numerous, more cruel, and constantly 
in use. Walk with me into the human 
soul. See, on every side, its engines 
of destruction in their many forms. 
See vanity, with its myriad vexations ; 
avarice, kindling fires worse than fires 
on dry prairies ; many-bladed selfish- 
ness, cutting wherever it goes ; and 
lusts without number. 

735. Small Transgressions. — The 
man that steals one single penny is — 
as great a transgressor against the 
laws of society as if he stole a thou- 
sand dollars? No, not exactly that. 
The man that steals one penny is — 
just as great a transgressor against the 
commercial interests of men as if he 
stole a thousand dollars? No, not 
that. The man that steals a penny is 
just as great a transgressor against ihe 



pjirity of /lis own conscience as if lu; 
stole a million of dollars. There is an 
impression that the culpability of 
things bears some proportion to their 
magnitude. To steal an apple is not 
much. In stealing it you do not get 
much ; but you get all the damage 
that you would if it was a golden 
apple. To betray a small trust has 
the same moral effect on the betrayer 
as to betray a large one. 

736. Care. — What is care? It is 
no specific thing. It is a word which 
includes the whole realm of human 
experience, and draws something from 
every part of it. Whatever thing in 
life worries you, chafes you, burdens 
you, alarms you, or in any way dis- 
tresses you— that is care. Care is the 
friction of the human mind. 

737. Small Vexations. — As it is 
only now and then that we have a 
landslide, while we are continually 
annoyed by the dust which sifts in at 
every crack, and door, and window, 
so it is only now and then that we 
have a crashing trouble, while we are 
perpetually annoyed by little daily 
cares and vexations. 

738. Cares not to be Emphasized. — 
Would you think that man fit for a 
hero who should occupy the leisure of 
peace in telling what hard commis- 
sions he had during the last campaign, 
how tired he was on the march, and 
how painful it was to carry his arms ? 
What idea would you have of a gen- 
eral or a soldier who should be more 
thoughtful of such contemptible per- 
sonalities than of those things that 
pertain to the interests of the cause in 
which he is engaged ? You that are 
called from darkness to light, and 
made to know the eternal obligation 
of your own souls ; you into whose 
hands are put jewels more precious 
and glowing than stars in the heavens; 
you who are made God's instruments 



i66 



SOCIAL LIFE 



for rcdccniing men, you ought to be 
ashamed to talk about your cares and 
responsibilities, as if they were onerous. 

739. Anxiety. — Water is necessary 
for the floating of timber ; but if a log 
be saturated with water, it sinks in the 
very element which should buoy it 
up. Many men are water-logged with 
anxiety, and instead of quickening 
them, it only paralyzes exertion. 

740. Live Above Care. — Dust, by 
its own nature, can rise only so far 
above the road ; and birds which fly 
higher never have it upon their wings. 
So the heart that knows how to fly 
high enough, escapes those little cares 
and vexations which brood upon the 
earth but cannot rise into the purer air, 

741. Fretting Shows Weakness. — 
Fretting is a perpetual confession of 
weakness. It says, " I want to, and 
can't." Fretting is hke a httle dog 
pawing and whining at a door, be- 
cause he can't get in. 

742. The Habit of Sulkiness. — It is 
supposed that ebullitions of temper are 
petty, insignificant faults ; but I can- 
not consider the opening of a fountain 
of unhappiness in the family or the 
social circle a petty matter. A single 
instance may be excused ; but the 
habit of being peevish, sulky, morose, 
is not a slight fault. It rises to the 
dignity of an ample and multitudinous 
sin. For nothing more destroys the 
happiness around about men than a 
bad temper. It is in the power of one 
person in a family to keep that family 
in smoke all day long. 

743. Needless Worry. — Human life 
is much like road life. You stand on 
a hill, and look down and across the 
valley, and another prodigious hill 
lifts itself up on the other side. The 
day is hot, your horse is weary, and 
you are tired ; and it seems to you that 
you cannot climb that long hill. But 
you had better trot down the hill you 



are on, and not trouble yourself about 
the other one. You find the valley 
pleasant and inspiriting. When you 
get across it, you meet only a slight 
ascent, and begin to wonder where the 
steep hill is which you saw. You 
drive along briskly, and when you 
reach the highest point, you find that 
there has not been an inch of the hill 
over which you have not trotted. 
The slight ascent looked almost like a 
perpendicular steep ; but when you 
come to pass over it, step by step, you 
find it to be a good traveling road. 

So it is with your troubles. Just in 
that way your anticipations of mis- 
chiefs hang before you ; and when you 
come to where they are, you find them 
to be all smooth turnpikes. Men 
ought to be ashamed, after they have 
done that two or three times, not to 
take the hint, and profit by it ; yet 
they will not. They will suffer from 
anticipated troubles, as much as though 
they had had no such experience. 

744. Folly of Fretting. — If you 
would keep a book, and every day 
put down the things that pester you, 
and see what becomes of them, it 
would be a benefit to you. You allow 
a thing to pester you, just as you allow 
a fly to settle on you and plague you ; 
and you lose your temper (or rather, 
get it ; for when men are surcharged 
with temper they are said to have lost 
it); and you justify yourselves for be- 
ing thrown off your balance by causes 
which you do not trace out. But if 
you would see what it was that threw 
you off your balance before breakfast, 
and put it down in a little book, and 
follow it up, and follow it out, and as- 
certain what becomes of it, you would 
see what a fool you were. 

745. Disputation. — Have you never 
met men that were full of questions — 
questions about dates ; questions about 
inspiration ; questions about doctrines ; 



FAULTS AND VICES 



167 



questions about hard passages ; ques- 
tions about symbols and types ; ques- 
tions about the church; questions about 
everything ? I fall in with them once 
in a while ; and then I am hke a man, 
wandering among flowers, who, ere he 
is aware, finds himself in the midst of 
a thick-set hedge, and gets his gar- 
ments torn, and is sorely annoyed and 
vexed. I never found the least parti- 
cle of good in a bramble. 

746. Dishonesty Atmospheric. — 
Dishonesty is an atmosphere. If it 
comes into one apartment it penetrates 
all the rest. 

747. Petty Cheating. — Little dis- 
honesties are like the drops that work 
through the banks of the levee : a drop 
is an engineer ; it tunnels a way for its 
fellows, and they, rushing, prepare for 
all behind them. 

748. Thou Shalt Not Covet. — One 
man goes along the street, and looks 
at the basket of his neighbor who is 
going home from market, and says, 
" If I were in that man's place I 
should have money enough to buy 
such things as he has in his basket. 
He can have luxuries, but I am poor, 
and cannot have them." Some men, 
if they see a rich man, say, " I am 
poor ; " if they see a man that is high 
up, they say "I am low down;" if 
they see a man that is well dressed, 
they say, "I am shabbily dressed ; " 
if they see a man that is prospered, 
they say, " I am not prospered." 
And so they are forever letting their 
conversation be filled with covetous- 
ness, and picking at other men's pros- 
perity, or at their own hearts on ac- 
count of it. Now the apostle says, 
" Let your conversation be without 
covetousness, and be content with 
such things as ye have." 

749. Coveting. — When unwary men 
come to buy, the fact that they may 
have come with a gambling spirit, or 



an avaricious spirit, or that they may 
be venturing out of their proper busi- 
ness, does not touch the question at 
all of the man that deliberately sells 
these stocks to them at fifty, or sixty, 
or seventy cents, which he knows can- 
not be worth to them ten, nor five, nor 
one. Why, what does he desire? 
He desires to get fifty cents out of 
these men for what he knows will be 
valueless to them. I do not say that 
all stock-brokerage is gambling or 
wicked ; for a great deal of it is on a 
real, necessary, and equitable basis : 
but that part of it which consists in 
selling things which the seller knows 
to be valueless, but the worthlessness 
of which the persons buying are not 
able to know anything about, I con- 
sider to be an eminent instance of 
coveting, a violation of the command 
of God against covetousness, and of 
the conscience of the seller. 

750. Dishonesty a Hard Master. — 
When a man breaks into my house 
and steals four or five suits of clothes, 
as well as what httle silver he can lay 
his hands upon, and many little con- 
veniences, and carries them to the 
pawnbroker's, and pockets the money, 
and is worth two or three hundred 
dollars more than he was, he succeeds 
^undoubtedly he succeeds ; and if 
that were the whole of his life, stealing 
would be successful : but, in judging 
of the success of this thief, you must 
take into account what is the average 
enjoyment and prosperity of thieves. 
Do thieves prosper? Every man who 
is a thief will bear witness, at last, that 
stealing is a hard master. The gains 
are small, the run of penalty great. 

751. Combative Disposition. — An 
unexploded torpedo is peaceable ; but 
we should not consider it an imple- 
ment of peace. It has everything 
ready for an explosion when it is 
touched off. And so a man cannot be 



168 



SOCIAL LIFE 



exj)ccted to have the Ciospel disposi- 
tion of peace simply because he is not 
in a broil, so long as he has disposi- 
tions which, upon occasion, when a fit 
opportunity presents itself, will bring 
him into some disagreeable collision. 

752. Temper. — There goes down 
by the side of a man's door, a tum- 
bling brook ; and he thinks to himself, 
"That continually rattling, that for- 
ever bubbling, that lazy, rollicking 
brook, I will take out of the way." 
Well, let him take it out of the way if 
he can. He may take his bucket, and 
work night and day, and scoop up 
bucketful after bucketful, and carry it 
away, and yet the brook will be undi- 
minished as long as the mountain 
clouds dissolve and feed its sources. 
But that man, in a better mood, says, 
"I will throw a little dam across that 
brook, and will build a mill, and will 
make it work for me." Ah ! that he 
can do. He builds his mill, and sets 
his wheel, and the brook is taught to 
run over the wheel, and the wheel 
works to the pressure of the brook, 
and industry goes on within. He 
could not destroy the brook, but he 
could make it work for him. A man 
cannot eradicate his temper, but he 
can determine what it shall do. 

753. Good-Natured Rudeness. — As 
when, for instance, a great weighty 
Newfoundland dog rushes into the 
parlor, upsets the table and treads on 
the children, he does not mean any- 
thing but caress, so there are men 
that overthrow each other with rude 
contacts and unconscious violence, 
disturbing the peace and harmony of 
all with whom they have to do. 

754' Aggressiveness. — Some men 
think that the pride of the world is 
immense, but nobody sees half so 
much pride in the world as proud 
people do. They stir it up. Every 
man has pride enough in him, if you 



approach him in such a way as to 
draw it out. There is a vast amount 
of ugliness in human nature that will 
show itself, if you deal with men so as 
to excite it. If you choose to take a 
pole, and stir up men from the bot- 
tom, you will find plenty of mud. On 
the other hand, every man has im- 
agination, and faith, and hope, and 
love, and aspiration — a yearning for 
things noble, and pure, and true ; and 
these quahties too can be stimulated. 

755. Unsocial Temper. — Many a 
man who has a blunt, harsh, per- 
emptory, disagreeable way of meeting 
people, excuses himself by saying, 
" Oh, it is my way." Of course it is 
his way ; and it is the trip-hammer's 
way, when a child's hand is on the 
anvil, to smash it ! A swine's way, 
or a vulture's way, is no more agree- 
able because it is his way. 

756. Grumblers. — Grumbling is 
treason to anything moral. It is the 
small change of treason. Beware of 
the man who does not live by hope, 
by faith, and by the love of God, who 
does not sleep, nor let his children 
sleep. When the Deluge had sub- 
sided, a raven was sent out, and he 
spread his dusky wings, and inspected 
the surface of the flood, and saw 
nothing but dead bodies, dead bodies, 
and dead bodies. A dove was sent 
out, and it came back with a single 
leaf. It could not get more than 
that ; but that was worth bringing, for 
it was the ground of hope and joy. 
The dove was sent forth again, and 
by that time the trees on the moun- 
tains were uncovered, and the bright 
bird nested in the bosom of their 
branches, and doubtless did not come 
back again ; while the old raven still 
cawed, and cawed, and cawed, and 
saw only the slime, and the death, 
and the carrion, and neither came 
back, nor plucked any leaf, nor saw 



FAULTS AND VICES 



169 



any bow in the heavens. Beware of 
the raven ! 

757. Croakers. — There are many 
patriarchs of the pool. Have you 
never seen these patriarchal croakers, 
of a summer evening, on the borders 
of some inland lake ? Have you never 
heard their croakings all through the 
night ? There is many and many a 
man who sits squat on the edge of 
his party-pool, croaking — croaking — 
croaking ; and you would think, if 
you did not know what the sound 
was, that all the spirits of the lower 
regions, weird and mischievous, were 
in the air. And yet, when you go and 
explore, what is the noise ? It is a 
frog — nothing more ! 

758. Frivolous Zeal. — To one be- 
fore whom dwelt the eternal calm and 
joy of a higher hfe, how foolish must 
have seemed the frivolous zeal, the 
intense absorption in trifles, the thor- 
oughly sensuous life, of the Pharisees ! 
Their sacred heats were like a rash 
upon the skin. They thought them- 
selves superlatively wise. They prided 
themselves upon their tact in manag- 
ing men, their sagacity in planning 
and skill in executing their petty 
schemes of party and personal ambi- 
tion. And yet in their very midst 
stood the greatest person that had 
ever appeared on earth, teaching sub- 
lime wisdom, almost unheard ; and 
the Pharisees could see nothing in 
him but a dangerous zealot ! 

759. Pride. — The prouder a man 
is, the more he thinks he deserves ; 
and the more he thinks he deserves, 
the less he really does deserve. The 
Httle he gets he looks upon with con- 
tempt because it is little. The much 
that he does not get he regards as evi- 
dence of the marvelous inequality of 
things in human life. He goes for- 
ever murmuring at what he looks 
upon as partiality in God's dealings 



with men. Such men are hke old 
hulks that make no voyages, and leak 
at every seam. 

760. Vanity. — I would rather fight 
pride than vanity, because pride has 
a stand-up way of fighting. You 
know where it is. It throws its black 
shadow on you, and you are not at a 
loss where to strike. But vanity is an 
elusive, an insect-hke, a multiplied 
feeling. Men that fight vanities are 
like men that fight midges and butter- 
flies. It is easier to chase them than 
to hit them. 

761. Conceit. — A man with a tele- 
scope saw lions in the moon ; they 
turned out to be flies on the glass. So 
men with conceit magnify things that 
belong to them, and insects become 
mountains. 

762. Religious Pride. — It became 
necessary that Christ should strike 
with severe strokes at the real lapse 
from morahty which had taken place 
among the Scribes and Pharisees. 
Scarcely anything less than that ter- 
rible denunciation could have reached 
through the thick hide of self-conceit 
which covers spiritual leaders when 
they have degenerated ; for there is noth- 
ing that is less pervious than conceited 
orthodoxy in any age, or in any nation. 

763. Self- Consciousness. — Many 
persons mistake the province of fore- 
thought and calculation, and attempt 
to carry themselves in the details and 
minute particulars of life by them. 
They rigidly inspect every act and ex- 
perience, as though each one must be 
taken up and looked at conscientiously, 
and narrowly, and watchfully. They 
go about with looks precomposed. 
They are sure to measure their steps. 
They will not laugh without a properly 
considered reason. If some wag sur- 
prises them into a laugh, they run 
back and look to see if they ought to 
have laughed. Everything in them 



lyo 



SOCIAL LIFE 



seems to be drawn out as tape meas- 
ures are, and seems, like them, to 
have a spring, wiiich causes it to fly 
back instantly, and to be measured 
off into inches and fractions of inches. 
There is nothing about them which re- 
minds one of natural clusters, or ten- 
drils, or moss, or wild-flowers. Every- 
thing about them is after the pattern 
of yardsticks, and surveyors' chains. 
They are a sort of conscientious arith- 
metic. Their mouth acts, not as 
flowers do, obedient to the sap be- 
neath ; but as do the locks of safes 
full of gold, into which a formal iron 
key must needs be thrust whenever 
you open them. Can there be any- 
thing in this world so intolerable as 
the doing everything on purpose, for- 
ever studying and measuring God and 
the universe with reference to Self! 

764. How to End Quarrels. — People 
who have mutual difficulties are like 
two men pulling at the opposite ends 
of a rope with a knot in it. The 
harder they pull the tighter the knot 
becomes, but if they give up and come 
together there is no difficulty in un- 
tying the knot. In a great many situ- 
ations and circumstances of life, you 
must give up when you want to beat. 

765. Holding a Grudge. — Men lay 
up a wrong done to them, and cherish 
it, until they can avenge it. As em- 
bers are raked up at night, they rake 
it up, and uncover it that it may burn 
the next day, and rake it up again, 
and uncover it again, and keep it 
alive, so that when there is a chance 
for revenge they can start the fire. 

766. Surly Forgiveness. — Did you 
ever see a dog rebuked for barking ? 
The master says, " Hush ! be still ! " 
and the dog stops barking ; but he 
keeps up a terrible growling. That is 
the way men forgive. They put down 
their anger or revenge so that they do 
not bite nor bark, but they growl. 



767. Forgiving Without Forgetting. 
— A man loses his temper, and says 
something wrong, and hurts a person's 
feelings ; but he immediately says, " I 
take it all back, and beg pardon." 
The person says to him, " 1 forgive 
you" ; but he thinks to himself, " I 
will pay him off for that." In the 
course of a week this person makes 
some harsh or unjustifiable remark, 
and the man says to him, " I think you 
spoke unadvisedly." "Ah! you are 
a pretty person to talk about speaking 
unadvisedly : what did you do last 
Tuesday morning?" He professed 
to have forgiven the offence, and yet, 
so far from having forgiven it, he laid 
it up in his memory, and improves the 
first opportunity which presents itself 
to resent it. 

768. Self-Seeking Friendship. — Is 
the shepherd necessarily a friend of 
the sheep because he keeps them and 
cares for them ? No, he may keep 
them and care for them that he may 
shear their fleece, and profit by it. Is 
the gardener a botanist because he 
cherishes the succulent lettuce, with 
painstaking, for the market .'' No, it 
is not the science, but the money, that 
he thinks of. And friends that make 
use of you when you are in prosper- 
ity, for the sake of their own comfort 
and convenience, and that hide them- 
selves from you in the time of trouble, 
are friends after the pattern of selfish- 
ness, and not after the pattern of 
divine love. 

769. Hypocrisy. — You cannot tell 
by the way a tree looks, whence its 
roots are sucking sap. There is many 
a man that wears clean linen, and has 
good associates, and appears regularly 
at the house of God, and seems to be 
a Christian man, who, if you follow 
down his roots, you will find to be 
drawing his nourishment from the 
common sewers. 



FAULTS AND VICES 



171 



770. Evil Disguised. — It is dis- 
gusting to see a poor, miserable lost 
creature tramping the streets in rags ; 
but she is no more a harlot than that 
embellished quean that walks or rides 
in the midst of wealth and pompous 
attendance. Harlotry is as hateful as 
love is sacred. Under every dis- 
guise, then, evil is to be known as evil. 

771. Evil Wit. — Men are accus- 
tomed to express indignation when 
things that are wicked are vulgar. A 
thing that in its stark-nakedness men 
would turn blushing away from, they 
will look upon with an unblushing face 
and with effrontery if you only put the 
thin guise of wit over it. The most 
hateful evil in the world is the evil 
that dresses itself in such a way that 
men cannot hate it. This is the har- 
lotry of wickedness. 

772. Flattery. — All use of the tongue 
to flatter is condemned. " Lie not one 
to another," saith the Apostle ; and 
all flattery is lying. It may have an 
element, a single thread of truth, in 
the woof or warp ; but, after all, it is a 
web of insincerity, and generally for a 
purpose. It is on an errand of selfish- 
ness from you. When you flatter a 
person you want something ; you have 
an end in view, and a flatterer is as 
mean as men well can be. 

773. The Flatterer. — Who has not 
seen the toady of society — the en- 
tozoon — the flatterer, who smoothly 
glides through household after house- 
hold, liking all things, praising all 
things, smooth and plausible, still 
studying your every whim, placating 
pride, coddling vanity, and with 
wondrous instinct, but like the needle, 
small and bright, carrying the thread of 
his own selfishness behind him all the 
time, and fabricating his own interests ? 

774. Fraud in Manufactures. — There 
is an element of fraud that goes through 
whatever is offered for sale in the 



market. The anvil has learned to 
lie ; the loom has learned to lie ; silk 
has learned to lie ; cotton has learned 
to lie ; flax has learned to lie ; hemp 
has learned to lie. Every element in 
society pretends to be one thing, and 
on the surface seems to be that thing, 
while at the bottom it is another thing. 
I do not undertake to say that men 
have not a right to make different 
grades of goods. I do not undertake 
to say that coffee shall be all coffee 
and not part chicory. I do not 
undertake to say that chicory shall 
be all chicory, and not part burned 
biscuits that have been sent four times 
across the sea. I do not undertake to 
say that there shall not be adulter- 
ations in commerce. But if a thing 
passes for a first-class article, it ought 
to be first-class ; if for second-class, it 
ought to be second-class ; and so on. 
It is proper enough that there should 
be various qualities ; but everything 
ought to be what it seems, and ought 
to seem what it is. 

775. Personal Criticism. — As a cat 
watching for mice does not look up 
though an elephant goes by, so per- 
sonal critics are so busy mousing for 
defects, that they let great excellences 
pass them unnoticed. 

776. The Habit of Criticism. — Do 
you not know persons who, on going 
into a room, will at once glance 
around and see whether the furniture 
is unmatched ; whether some things 
are extravagantly fine, while others 
are poor ; whether the carpet is worn 
a little, and mended, as though there 
had been an attempt to make the most 
out of a little ? Do you not know per- 
sons who, on looking at another's 
dress, only see the things that are out 
of taste, and that mar? Do you not 
know persons who, on beholding a 
face, see only the wrong feature, if 
there is one ? Do you not know per- 



172 



SOCIAL LIFE 



sous who, on listening to a conver- 
sation, take notice of only those parts 
where the grammar breaks down, 
where those that are conversing take 
a generous liberty in syntax, or where 
they make use of an unlucky word, 
being very careful to sec all the faults, 
but paying very little attention to the 
subject matter, though it may be very 
good? Such persons come to have a 
settled habit of directing their mind to 
the detection of faults, as if there was 
a sort of smartness in it ! 

777. Sensitiveness. — It is a fact 
that a man who has no skin over his 
nerves, has no skin over his nerves, 
and that he suffers ; and you that wear 
rhinoceros hides are not to despise 
him because he cannot bear as much 
as you can. 

778. Fault-Finding. — Carrion-crows 
and turkey-buzzards like carrion, and 
hunt for it. And where I see men 
going round and watching for faults 
and imperfections, and seeing nothing 
good, I mark those men, "Turkey- 
buzzards and carrion-crows." For 
the dove shall fly through that sunlit 
air that reveals naught but loathsome 
corruption to the crow and the buz- 
zard, and shall see no carrion, and 
only blossoming growths and sweet 
fields. What you see, depends upon 
the eye with which you look. 

779. Heedless Judgments, — IVIen 
seldom make it a matter of conscience 
to see things as they are, and hear 
things as they really report themselves. 
They follow their curiosity, their sense 
of wonder, their temper, their interests, 
or their prejudices, instead of their 
judgment and their conscience. How 
many men were there around the 
corner? "Twenty," says the man, 
quickly. There were seven. How 
long did you have to wait? "Two 
hours, at least." It was just three- 
quarters of an hour by the watch. 



So, in a multitude of things that hap- 
pen every day, one man repeats what 
his imagination reported to him, and 
another man what his impatient, irri- 
table feelings said to him. 

780. Needless Talk. — I see men 
who use more wind to waft a cockle- 
boat across a pond than would be re- 
quired to carry a man-of-war across 
the sea ! 

781. Endless Talking. — Did you 
ever think what a volume your talk 
would make if it were printed ? If 
everything that some persons say in a 
single day were printed, what a vol- 
ume it would make ! and if all they 
say in a year were printed, what a 
library it would make ! I pity the 
man that should have to read the one 
or the other. The exaggerations, the 
overcolorings, the misrepresentations, 
the lies (for we all lie continually) 
which escape us when we are speak- 
ing about ourselves, about our chil- 
dren, about our families, about our 
property, about our neighbors, about 
everything that we have to do with, — 
what must be their influence upon the 
world? Still, how few there are that 
know anything about the use of their 
tongue, which is forever on the move ! 

782. Control of the Tongue. — When 
it comes to irritableness of temper, to 
severity of speech or to any such other 
form of unchristian conduct, I am 
very stringent. // can be overcome. 
This is a question about which I will 
not flinch. If your tongue is inflam- 
mable and it flashes like powder, it 
may cost you something of a struggle, 
but it is a struggle in which a man can 
conquer within a reasonable time. He 
can say, when the pressure comes, 
" I will hold my peace ; I will not 
speak a word, either good or bad, and 
I will do it as in the presence of God." 
He may fall, again and again, but 
sooner or later he can learn to control 



FAULTS AND VICES 



73 



his tongue, his temper and his passion. 
This is a thing about which there is to 
be no going back. It is one of the 
things in regard to which you should 
be severer with yourselves than in re- 
gard to almost anything else. 

783. Nagging. — Near to mischief 
is the use of the tongue for teasing. 
It becomes a more positive instrument, 
then, of the evil passions. I do not 
allude altogether, yet, to the more 
malignant stabs which the tongue can 
give, and does give, but to the habit 
of inflicting unnecessary worry and 
punishment upon those around about 
you ; to the basilar instinct of hurt- 
ing ; to the animal propensity of biting 
or scratching. We have brought along 
down the Darwinian animal develop- 
ment ; only we have done it, not with 
our claws and teeth, but with our 
tongue. Sarcastic allusions ; cutting 
remarks ; all forms of unkind badi- 
nage with the tongue ; nagging ; the 
calling up of disagreeable things ; the 
saying things that make one blush ; 
the seeing what you can do with the 
snap of your tongue to those around 
about you — all these things should be 
avoided. They may be a milder 
form, but they are a form, of the ma- 
lignant disposition. 

784. Teasing. — It does not cease 
with youth. Grown folks, good-na- 
tured, kind-hearted, well-meaning, and 
full of benevolence, often show this 
perverse spirit in the midst of all their 
kindness. By sharp speech, by veiled 
sarcasm, by exciting curiosity which 
they will not gratify, by narrating pre- 
tended facts, by sinister compliments, 
by rallying one when circumstances 
forbid a reply, by equivocal praise, by 
blunt telling of some truth that had 
been better left unsaid, and by hun- 
dreds of ingenious ways which time 
would fail to tell, people inflict pain 
upon each other. 



Those who in the main are striving 
to make friends happy, will have one 
black thread in the web of white. 
Those who really love each other have 
a strange fondness for stirring each 
other up. 

785. Malicious Gossips. — Would it 
be ;«a«slaughter to kill ?ifooI? Ought 
not the law to give a man some dis- 
cretionary power over the life of these 
mosquitoes and gnats, that have, by 
some strange freak of nature, grown 
into the shape of men, without losing 
the propensities of insects ? 

786. Ugly Words. — Many a word 
drops a seed from us that grows up a 
thorn-bush in the soul on which it 
falls. 

787. Evil-Speaking. — How the 
knowledge of some wrong in another 
person burns in a man until he can 
tell it somewhere ! If he would hold 
his tongue the thing would die, like a 
fire without air : but no, he wants con- 
fidentially to communicate it ; and the 
associate confidentially communicates 
it ; they need some help to keep the se- 
cret, and they communicate it ; and so 
it goes like wildfire all through the com- 
munity. What cannibahsm is it that 
leads us to desire to eat up the reputa- 
tions of men ! 

788. False Witness. — You shall not 
bear false witness against your neigh- 
bor either by your tongue or by your 
ear. It is as bad for a man to quietly 
hear another man slandered as to 
slander him. And, brethren, it is not 
enough for you to maintain in your 
speech and in your whole conduct the 
sanctity of the reputation of those 
around about you. There is a phase 
of honor far more sacred than that. 
There is in every man a silent judg- 
ment-seat, a chamber in his own 
thoughts, where he thinks evil or 
thinks well of his neighbors ; where 
he looks upon them charitably or un- 



174 



SOCIAL LIFE 



charitably ; and you are violating one 
of the sanctities of God's Law when 
you dare to think unjustly of your fel- 
low-men. They are not present to 
hear your charge or to defend them- 
selves against it ; and if you condemn 
them, you condemn them unseen and 
unheard. 

789. Self-Description. — When we 
talk about ourselves we almost invari- 
ably use Latin words, and when we 
talk about our neighbors we use Saxon 
words. And one of the best things a 
man can do, I think, is to examine 
himself in the Saxon tongue. If a 
man tells that which is contrary to the 
truth, let him not say, " I equivo- 
cate" : let him say, "I lie." Lie! 
why, it brings the judgment-day right 
home to a man's thought. Men do 
not like it, but it is exactly the thing 
that will most effectually touch the 
moral sense ; and the more the moral 
sense is touched the better. If a man 
has departed from rectitude in his 
dealings with another, let him not say, 
"I took advantage," which is a 
roundabout, long sentence : let him 
say, " I cheated." That is a very di- 
rect word. It springs straight to the 
conscience, as the arrow flies whizzing 
from the bow to the center of the 
mark. Does it grate harshly on your 
ear? Nevertheless, it is better that 
you should employ it ; and you should 
come to this determination: "I will 
call things that I detect in my conduct 
by those clear-faced, rough-tongued 
words that my enemies would use if 
they wanted to sting me to the quick." 

790. Slang. — In the use of the 
tongue there is indulgence in slang ; 
and that, too, among educated people 
who consider themselves as refined. 
There is no beauty in it. Now and 
then there is an extraordinary phrase, 
that has some vitality, and it is not 
slang — it is picturesque. There are 



phrases originated that really do touch 
the vital matter as no ordinary para- 
phrastic language can ; but that does 
not include those ten thousand ever- 
coming and ever-changing phrases 
that have no beauty and no meaning 
in them, and are scarcely even gro- 
tesque. We would not permit our 
daughters so to use their feet and their 
hands as they permit themselves to 
use their tongue, contrary to the pro- 
prieties of life and of good breeding. 
Such improprieties are warts upon the 
tongue, not beauties. 

791. Rejoicing in Iniquity. — Gener- 
ally speaking, when I sec men taking 
to anything naturally, 1 say, " It is be- 
cause they like it." When I see a 
man read every murder in the news- 
paper, every single case of crim. con. 
in the courts ; when I see a man eat- 
ing carrion every day, morning, noon, 
and night — hunting for it — I say to 
myself, " He likes it." I make up my 
mind that he does rejoice in iniquity. 
I am convinced that there is something 
in this garbage which meets a want in 
his nature. As for myself, I should as 
soon set up my dweUing in the com- 
mon sewer of New York, as to dabble 
in the stench pools of the criminal 
columns of our daily papers, which 
every day pour out mud, mud, mud — 
fetid, foul, stinking mud. 

792. Ear and Tongue Leagued for 
Evil. — Where there are no persons 
that enjoy slanderous stories, evil tales 
about men, there will be no widespread 
contagion of mischief. It would seem 
as if there was a league between the 
ear and the tongue, to make as much 
out of evil as it is possible. The ear, 
like a sewer, gathers in whatever there 
is going in the community ; and the 
tongue, like a scavenger, runs with it 
from house to house. 

793. Native Evil Finds Evil. — A 
bad man finds that which is bad. He 



EXCELLENCES AND VIRTUES 



175 



carries it with him. An irritable man 
finds not only irritable men, but oc- 
casions for irritability. A quarrelsome 
man finds occasion to quarrel in every 
nook and corner. A discontented 
man — O the jolts that are under his 
wheels ! O the provocations that are 
brought to bear upon him ! A dis- 
honest man every day has ten thou- 
sand things telling him of dishonest 
ways. More than mosquitoes in sum- 
mer are the thoughts of dishonesty 
that are round about a brain that 
naturally tends to be dishonest. The 
man says, " I am tempted of the 
devil." Yes ; and the devil knows 
where to tempt you. He sows his 
seed on ground prepared before- 
hand. 

794. Habits of Hearing. — How 
many persons are in regard to hear- 
ing, like sentinels who, when set to 
take care of things that are good, are 
always asleep, but who, when set to 
take care of things that are bad, never 
go to sleep ! How many men take 
account of their habits of hearing ? 



795. The Hearing of Evil.— If there 
is one thing that has been repeated 
over and over again, it is the caution 
about hearing ; and yet how many 
persons there are who do not use their 
ears to hear what it might do them 
good to hear, but as a bolting-cloth to 
catch only the bran and let the flour go! 
How many there are who hear every- 
thing that is keen, pungent, and salient 
in scandal, and nothing favorable, 
commendable, praiseworthy of men ! 

796. Scandal. — The true mother 
would never let go out of the door 
any tale of what little meanness 
the child had done, or of what little 
animahsm it was subject to. Such 
things in the family are sacred ; love 
smothers them ; but in larger circles it 
is our privilege, when a fault has been 
laid, to sit on it till it hatches, and to 
encourage the breed ! We solace our 
hours with the shrewd penetration 
which we possess. We have heard 
something that is most amusing ; and, 
with a laugh for the bow, we send the 
venomed arrow out. 



XVIII. EXCELLENCES AND VIRTUES 



797. Educated Virtues. — It is a 
great deal better that the clownish, ill- 
bred country lout, coming to the city 
and attending a dancing master for 
good manners should put his feet ex- 
actly right than to go on with his 
clumsy, slouching gait ; but no man 
has manners who is thinking about 
manners. It is not until the foot has 
forgotten that it ever has been taught 
as a scholar, or the hand that it ever 
has been instructed, that there is grace 
in it. When a man has learned any- 
thing, and has to stop and think of it, 
he has not learned it. When a man 
has any virtue that requires to be 
called, that virtue is not educated. 
When a man has to open the door of 



the soul, and call down, " Patience, 
come here, you are wanted," that man 
has not learned to be patient. 

798. Little Virtues. — Do not be 
troubled because you have not great 
virtues. God made a million spears 
of grass where he made one tree. 
The earth is fringed and carpeted, not 
with forests, but with grasses. Only 
have enough of little virtues and com- 
mon fidelities, and you need not 
mourn because you are neither a hero 
nor a saint. 

799. Small Excellences. — Look 
upon your scarfs, so brilliant. The 
color shines afar off. Comely it is in 
the vat of the dyer. Comely it is on 
the shoulder of beauty. How ex- 



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SOCIAI. LIFE 



quisile is the dye that comes from the 
cochineal insect. And yet, how small 
is that insect — scarcely, I may say, so 
big as the point of a pin — which feeds 
so inconspicuously on the under side 
of the leaf of the cactus, nourishing 
his growth quite unconscious that as 
one of all the myriads of all these 
little shining points will he by and 
by help to produce those glowing 
colors which civilization and refine- 
ment will make so meet and comely 
in distant lands ! So it is with good 
deeds. The great things in this 
world are the sum of infinitesimal 
little things. 

800. Self-Knowledge, as to Conduct, 
— We should keep ourselves informed 
of our conduct in its relations to sym- 
pathy and affection. Are we acting 
upon men by our selfish instincts, our 
animal natures, and our executive 
forces ; or are we acting upon them by 
our affections, our moral sentiments, 
and our understanding ? We imagine 
with wonder the passage of a comet 
through space, flaming and sparkUng 
along strange paths, and glowing upon 
stars innumerable as it goes ; but that 
is not half so wonderful as the passage 
of the human heart, flaming and 
sparkling and glowing with ten thou- 
sand effects shot upon every man we 
meet, as we move through life. 
Comets are cold in distance, and all 
their radiance falls without effect ; but 
the human soul, as it moves up and 
down the ways of experience, is pro- 
ducing ten thousand effects at every 
single movement, many of which we 
know nothing about : but we should 
aim to know. 

801 . Gifts of the Heart. — Every one 
of you has, in his own heart, a garden. 
The root of everything that is beauti- 
ful, and savory, and desirable, is 
planted in every man's soul ; and 
every man is expected of the Lord to 



bring it to some degree of perfection. 
Christ says, " Freely ye have re- 
ceived ; freely give." He says to 
you, "Go forth and, wherever you 
are, pluck those flowers that bloom in 
the garden of your soul, take the fair 
things that are in you, and do not use 
them for yourself alone, but distribute 
them among others." 

802. Expression of Pleasure. — If 
men are surprised by a great pleasure, 
you will see the difference between 
one and another in this, that a stolid 
or selfish man will absorb his pleasure, 
while a generous nature, like a bell, 
will ring out his. It is the instinct of 
every true and large nature to dis- 
tribute its own sensations of enjoy- 
ment, to radiate its own emotions of 
pleasure. You cannot meet a noble 
man and spend a few moments with 
him without burning to tell your 
friends something about him. 

803. Making Others Happy. — The 
business of making men happy that 
are not happy does not lie half so near 
to the consciousness of men as it ought 
to. If it is in the power of men to 
touch the higher nature, and to rouse 
others to cheer, to good nature, to 
hope, to good will, to mirth, to cour- 
age, then this is a part of their Chris- 
tian duty. 

What is an adagio from one of 
Beethoven's symphonies ? What, but 
a mere motion of the wind — a con- 
geries of invisible pulsations in the 
air ? And yet, when care has low- 
ered, and life sits heavily on your 
heart, one half-hour in hearing such 
divine sounds renews your soul, and 
sends you away recreate. How much 
more, then, when not dead instru- 
ments, but the living faculties of a 
truly loving Christian soul, send forth 
their influence ! How the heart of 
man can make the heart of man pul- 
sate with pleasure, if it will ! 



EXCELLENCES AND VIRTUES 



177 



804. Self-knowledge, as to Speech. 
— There are a great many persons 
who examine themselves as to mo- 
tives ; but how many persons ex- 
amine themselves in the matter of 
speech ? Do you know what your 
habits are with regard to talking? 
Do you talk a great deal too much ? 
Do you say a great many things 
heedlessly ? Do you indulge a great 
deal in out-swelling words of pride? 
Are your words like sparks of fire, or 
are they hke drops of oil ? Do you 
make life sweet with your tongue 
wherever you go, or is your tongue 
hke the tongue of a serpent, carrying 
terror? How often do you think of 
your speech? I venture to say that 
every person in your neighborhood 
knows more about it than you do. 

805. Love to be Manifested. — Do 
not keep the alabaster boxes of your 
love and tenderness sealed up until 
your friends are dead. Fill their lives 
with sweetness. Speak approving, 
cheering words while their ears can 
hear them, and while their hearts can 
be thrilled by them. The things you 
mean to say when they are gone, say 
before they go. . . . Flowers on the 
coffin cast no fragrance backward 
over the weary days. 

806. Cheerfulness. — I have some- 
times ridden through fields and lanes, 
where, without seeing anything, I 
looked about to see something, the 
air was so sweet, and said, "The 
grapevines ai-e blossoming." And I 
have often been in a company where 
persons were so pleasant and cheerful 
and good-natured, that I looked to see 
whose grapevines were blossoming. 

807. Sunny Dispositions. — There 
are natural-born comforters. I have 
seen some men whose coming in 
through the door was like the coming 
in of the sun in winter. There are 
some people who are like the whistling 



of the northeast wind, and I bless God 
when they go. There are others who 
are like the balm of summer days that 
bring birds and prophesy flowers ; 
and I bless God when they come. 

808. "The Lord Be With Thee." 
— It was their ordinary mode of 
salutation in the time and country of 
Boaz. It was beautiful for the owner 
of a field to go forth and greet his 
reapers thus, and for them to greet 
him in the same spirit. What if a 
director of a railroad, nowadays, 
should come out in the morning, and 
say to his workmen, " The Lord be 
with you ! " What would they think, 
or say ? So it seems to us a wonder- 
ful period in which the householder 
and master addressed those who 
served him in these stately words, 
"The Lord be with you," and they 
said in reply, "The Lord bless thee." 
It was a good deal better than the 
best of our salutations. Take, for 
instance, our "Good-bye." That 
you know, is "God be with you" — 
shrunk up to a skin. 

8og. Good-Natured People. — A real 
good-natured man is the most trouble- 
some morsel that the malign passions 
ever attempt to feed upon. He is the 
natural superior of irritable persons. 
He that can govern himself can con- 
trol others. An irritable man, whom 
any one can excite, is like a horse 
kept at livery, ridden by every one, 
and spurred by each rider. Nobody 
is so little his own master as he who 
can be stirred and provoked at an- 
other's will. 

810. Variableness of " Truth." 
— Truth is not always the same. 
That is to say, it is a series of endless 
adaptations. The statement of truth 
is like registration on a thermometer, 
where the mercury is going up or 
down all the time, according to the 
changes which are taking place in the 



■ 78 



SOCIAL LIFE 



temperature. The statement of truth 
constantly varies through all the 
moods of the atmosphere by which it 
is influenced. 

For example, one would suppose 
that if there were any truth about 
which there was no doubt, it was the 
need of neatness. " Neatness is neat- 
ness," you say. I beg your pardon. 
What is thought very neat indeed in a 
stone mason's work would be con- 
sidered very far from neat in your 
bedroom. We judge of neatness ac- 
cording to circumstances. 

8ii. Truth the Bond of Society. — 
The political economy of the matter is 
this, that lying disintegrates society. 
Men are united together in the great 
interests of human life by trust. On 
an average they believe, when a man 
says a thing ; when he says he has 
done a thing they take it for granted. 
We could not live if we could not be- 
lieve in men. " William, have you 
deposited those checks in the bank?" 
"Yes, sir, I have." "May be he 
has, may be he has not ; I will go 
round to the bank and see." "Has 
my clerk deposited checks for $5,000 
in the bank to-day?" "Yes," says 
the cashier, " he has." " But there 
may be a collusion between him and 
some of the bank officers, I will go 
inside and see." " Is your cashier to 
be believed when he says my clerk 
has deposited $5,000?" If a man 
had to do all that circumlocution in 
his business he would not have time 
to do anything else. The progress of 
all human life begins in the belief that 
men substantially tell the truth. 

812. Gentleness. — Gentleness is 
not a quality of not having vi77t. 
When a man is strong and energetic, 
and at the same time uses his strength 
and energy and power with sweet- 
ness, that is gentleness. See the great 
swarthy smith as he returns from the 



anvil, every muscle herculean, after 
the day's labor washing himself that 
he may come back to his own com- 
plexion. As the little child totters 
out to him, see with what ineffable 
sweetness he gathers up the little one 
on his shoulder, and holds the babe 
in his arm. He that could swing a 
giant and slay him walks about, the 
servant of the little children, so gently 
that they love him almost more than 
they love the mother's bosom. Gen- 
tleness is the sweetness of strength in 
an element of love. Weakness is not 
necessarily gentle. 

813. The Peaceful Spirit. — "And 
your feet shod with the preparation of 
the gospel of peace." Ah, how soft 
is the touch that one's foot must have 
with such sandals upon them ! Ah, 
how unwearable are such shoes on 
earth ! If one could but walk along 
the ways of life " shod with the prep- 
aration of the gospel of peace," of 
every man it might be said as Scott 
said of the Lady of the Lake that trod 
on a harebell, which instantly lifted 
its head to look after her retreating 
footsteps. Wondrous are these ele- 
ments of defence ; and with them, 
how does one, quicker than the 
winged and fabled shoe of Mercury 
trod upon the air, tread in this im- 
mortal conflict. 

814, Difficulty of Goodness amid 
Evil. — If you take a lighted candle, 
beautiful and symmetrical, and carry 
it out of doors unsheltered, the wind 
blows it about in every direction ; the 
flame flares right and left, and melts 
down the body on which it feeds. 

People of a kind and genial dispo- 
sition in a selfish world, undertaking 
to carry that disposition for the medi- 
cation of other souls, are frequently 
jarred and jolted by the discords 
which they encounter outside of them- 
selves ; and they have all the time to 



EXCELLENCES AND VIRTUES 



179 



fight with their circumstances. God 
sometimes puts a man in such a posi- 
tion in Hfe that he is at peace with 
himself but out of joint with the out- 
ward world ; and that is a very solemn 
place to stand in. 

815. Forgiveness. — In an act of 
forgiveness you must burn, not the 
arrow alone, but the bow, too ; you 
must not only refrain from retaliation, 
but you must get rid of the desire to 
retaliate. 

816. Spirit of Forgiveness. — As we 
do not keep tinder in every box in the 
house, so we do not keep the sense of 
anger in every faculty. When one 
comes against the door of some facul- 
ties with an injury, we look over the 
railing and say, — " I'll forgive you for 
that, for you did not get in." But by 
and by, when the faculty where we 
are sensitive is entered, then we grind 
our teeth and say, — " I could have 
forgiven him for anything but that ! " 

We must not arrogate to ourselves 
a spirit of forgiveness, until we have 
been touched to the quick where we 
are sensitive, and borne it meekly. 
And meekness is not mere white- 
facedness, a mere contemplative vir- 
tue ; it is maintaining peace and pa- 
tience amidst pelting provocations. 

817. How to Repay Injury. — The 
man who has been injured is the doc- 
tor of the man that did the injury. He 
is called to prescribe for him. You 
are to supply that element which the 
man lacks for whom you prescribe. 
If he has been mean, that is a reason 
why you should be magnanimous. If 
he has been dishonest, that is a reason 
why you should be scrupulously hon- 
est. If he has been cruel, that is a 
reason why you should be intensely 
forgiving and benevolent. Right is 
the refutation of wrong, and the nurse 
and cure for it. For, if you do wick- 
edly to a man, and find that piercing 



him only brings sugar, as tapping the 
maple tree brings the sap out of 
which sugar is made ; if you pierce a 
man and find that only sweetness 
flows from the wound — this leads to 
better thoughts and a regenerated dis- 
position. 

818. Like Begets Like. — One of 
the conditions required in the produc- 
tion of peace is, that you shall have it 
to a degree, at least, in your own soul. 
No man, himself being excessively 
nervous, can successfully nurse a 
nervous person. One's nerves oscil- 
late and beat upon other people. It 
requires good health to inspire sick- 
ness, and lift the weak up out of their 
ailments ; and if a man is to be a 
peacemaker he must have the flavor 
of peace in his own soul. 

819. Gratitude. — There was a man 
in Boston (I know not whether he 
lives yet, — yes, he lives, but I know 
not whether he lives in this world) 
who, though not rich, was accustomed 
to go into the courts of justice every 
morning to give bail for culprits that 
had no friends ; and it was his testi- 
mony that of all those for whom he 
gave bail, not one betrayed him, — 
not one left him in the lurch. And 
do you suppose that those creatures 
whom Christ has helped, and whom 
he has given a hope of eternal salva- 
tion, would turn against him, their 
best friend, and the one to whom they 
are indebted for their choicest bless- 
ings ? Would that be human nature ? 
Is there anything on God's earth like 
gratitude to inspire a soul to act in the 
right direction ? 

820. Fidelity. — A ship laden with 
passengers, and under the charge of a 
faithful man, sets out on a voyage in 
the dead of winter. Owing to a varia- 
tion of the compass he runs the ship 
upon a reef. There she remains fixed, 
with the waves of the ocean raging 



i8o 



SOCIAL LIFE 



about her iidc like hungry wolves im- 
patient for their victim. The ship- 
master is the only man on the vessel 
that is calm, and he goes about speak- 
ing words of encouragement to the 
others, and making preparations for 
their relief. When he has got some- 
thing rigged for taking them off, the 
women and children are handed down 
first ; then the other passengers fol- 
low ; and then the crew ; and the 
shipmaster is the last man to leave the 
wreck — almost frozen, and worn out 
with watching. But he is so be- 
numbed and so weary that he misses 
his hold, and falls over ; and the 
ocean sings his requiem. And there 
is not a man that hears his story who 
does not feel that there has been a 
monument erected to fidelity and dis- 
interested benevolence, which shall 
stand as long as the name of that man 
endures. 

821. Justice, — It is supposed that 
justice is a simple quality. It is one 
of the most complex, perplexing, re- 
condite, and unknown of qualities. 
We know what justice is in some 
things, in certain low relations, as be- 
tween man and man. It has been 
established by custom in some cases, 
and by law in others ; but the world 
had to grow a great while before it 
could know what is just under what 
now seem very simple circumstances. 
As circumstances change, and ques- 
tions become more complex, it be- 
comes more difficult to tell what justice 
is. Justice itself becomes composite 
as it becomes mixed with taste, and 
love, and other elements. There is a 
vast literature to it. As the alphabet 
is simple in each letter, but is the 
father of an infinite literature, so the 
combination of these simple qualities 
becomes voluminous in possibilities. 

822. Sincerity. — One reason why 
men have been so fascinated with 



what are called the " pre-Raphaelite 
pictures" is that they were painted, 
not for exhibition, but as a sincere 
offering to truth. They were genu- 
ine ; and therefore, however much 
they were " out of drawing," however 
far they were from the niceties of a 
more refined art, there was always an 
earnestness and a simplicity in them, 
and they meant what they expressed. 
This was even more true of the old 
German than of the Italian schools. 
There is nothing like the hearty sim- 
plicity of the early German painters. 

After Raphael, and largely in con- 
sequence of his influence, there came 
a day when there was more beauty 
and grace, and more correctness of 
form ; but a large spirit of exhibitori- 
ness crept into the pictures. There is 
scarcely a Madonna of Raphael that 
does not look as though it was con- 
scious of being a Madonna ; scarcely 
a sweet and angelic face that is not 
apparently aware that it is sweet and 
angelic ; scarcely a pious countenance 
that does not seem to know that it is 
pious. There is an intolerable sense 
of vanity that has crept into all his 
pictures. And in this way love of 
praise has corrupted art, as it is apt to 
do with nature — human nature. 

823. " Mercy, with Cheerfulness." — 
Some persons run at you like a dog 
with his mouth open ; and they think 
that they have shown you mercy be- 
cause at last they turn away and do 
not bite you. But mercy is to be 
beautiful and gracious. It is to be 
bestowed not surlily but cheerfully. 

824. The Owning of Offences. — It 
is not the offence, but the defence of 
the offence, that makes it hard for us 
to bear with one another. A man 
may say to me, " You are a vile sin- 
ner ; " he may rain his words on me 
like blows; but if he comes back 
when his passion has gone down, with 



EXCELLENCES AND VIRTUES 



181 



tears in his eyes, and says, " Oh! for- 
give me ; I did not mean it," it is all 
gone, quicker than a flash of hghtning. 
I love him all the more. The fault is 
not hard to bear. It is the defending 
the fault, it is the refusing to make 
up under fault, that rankles, and 
makes us ugly in return. Where 
there is one ugly man, there are two, 
generally. 

825. Right, Unconscious Rebuke of 
Wrong. — The right is itself a contra- 
diction of the wrong, an exposition of 
it, and a rebuke which it cannot bear. 
Lies never were able to stand up and 
look the sweet face of Truth fairly in 
the eye. A lie invariably sneaks 
away, or burrows, or puts on a veil, or 
pretends to be the truth. A dishonest 
thing cannot face an honest thing, an 
impurity cannot look a bright-eyed 
purity unflinchingly in the face. A 
meanness cannot stand up against a 
magnanimity. Stinginess is cowed in 
the presence of generosity, 

826. Honesty in Work. — Any man 
who has spent an honest life in rearing 
up the physical economy of society, 
by which he is to promote the happi- 
ness of households, and the industries 
and frugalities, and so the welfare, of 
his fellow-men, has lived to a good 
purpose. For the man who is a car- 
penter, or builder, or architect, or 
engineer, does not work merely for 
present remuneration. He puts that 
in his work which will remunerate 
him. I think many a man has looked 
back from heaven and thanked God 
that he had a chance to bless man- 
kind by building good houses. And 
some men have, perhaps, looked back, 
not from heaven, with remorse, that 
they built houses that were a curse to 
mankind. 

827. Consider the Sensitive, — A day 
that is piercingly cold to a person 
whose blood is thin, and whose whole 



system is low -toned, is a charming day 
to the great rude, robust man, who is 
full of vigor, and who has an abun- 
dance of blood of the right sort, sending 
life all through him ; and there are as 
many temperaments of the mind as 
there are of the body. 

828. Frugality. — There is some- 
thing beautiful, I know, in the thought 
of a parent leaning on the shoulders 
of those whom he has reared. Never- 
theless, there is something more beau- 
tiful in the thought of a man leaning 
upon his own staff. In youth you are 
cutting the staff that you are to lean 
upon in old age. There is a reason, 
therefore, for frugality and moderation 
in expense, that reaches as far out as 
your life is long, and that will seem to 
you more and more apparent as you 
grow older. 

829. " Love Beareth all Things." — 
No matter what people do, no matter 
what they say, no matter how much 
they put upon you or put you about, 
the true spirit of love is sweet, and 
quiet, and takes all the vexatious part 
of social intercourse just as a traveler 
does the inconvenience which he 
meets on his way. He does not think 
of fighting the storm, or whining about 
it ; he is in it, and he must go through 
it, so he makes up his mind to that, 
and does not complain. It is the same 
in disarranged domestic or neighbor- 
hood affairs. The true disposition 
bears what comes upon it under all 
circumstances. 

830. Quality in Virtues. — We are 
familiar with this term quality as it is 
applied to matter, to timber, to fabrics, 
to metals, to workmanship, to jewelry, 
to arts. A picture may be a picture ; 
and yet its quality may be such as to 
rank it very low. Cloth may be 
cloth ; and yet it may be made up of 
shoddy, and its quality very inferior. 
And there is such a thing as quality. 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



too, in virtues. Men may have vir- 
tues ; but tiieir quality may be very 
low, for quality is recognized just as 
much in disposition as in physical 



things. As to virtues, they ought to 
have these marks of quality : truth, 
largeness, continuity, universality, 
fruitfulness, fineness and beauty. 



XIX. SOCIAL RELATIONS 



I. Society. 

831. Social Polish. — If you take 
rocks just as they come out of the 
quarry, they are all ragged and rough ; 
but if you roll them in the bed of a 
river for about a hundred thousand 
years, they become round and smooth 
as marbles. People who do not mix 
with other people are sharp and 
angular and cutting ; but folks who 
mingle with their fellows have their 
corners rubbed off, and rounded and 
made smooth. 

832. Social Interdependence. — There 
is no isolated thing known to us in 
creation. Everything is a part of 
something else. Nothing lives except 
by depending on some other thing. 
The bird eats the insect ; the insect 
ate the leaf; the leaf fed upon the 
sap; the sap came from the ground; 
the ground drank at the cloud's lips ; 
and so you may push all things back, 
and find that one stands on another. 
In this arrangement of creation, we 
need food for every part of the body. 
The body was not built so that it 
should stay built, but so that it must 
be rebuilt, in part at least, every single 
day. The bone needs one food, the 
hair another, the nerve another, and 
the muscle another. And, in analogy 
with this, the mind, just as much, de- 
mands stimulus and occupation that 
shall give to it the nourishment and 
vitality which food gives to the body. 

. . . The soul will not have solitari- 
ness. That is hunger. Men love to 
travel in companies, and to work in 
companies, simply, it is said, because 
they are " social." Yet what do you 



mean by that, but this : that there is a 
yearning thought which goes out to 
the common life by which one is built. 

833. Influence of Society. — The 
family, — the school, — the church, — 
regulated and virtuous civil society, — 
wholesome and normal occupation, 
which increases physical comforts, — 
all these make the number of children 
reared to high moral character greater, 
and the training of such children 
easier. I would rather undertake to 
bring up my child to virtue and mo- 
rality and piety in the city, bad as it 
is, than on the desert of Sahara, or on 
a flat rock where there was nothing 
but him, me, and the rock. You 
could bring up a toadstool there, but 
not a man. 

834. Man's Susceptibility. — The 
thermometer is not so sensitive to 
heat, the barometer is not so sensitive 
to pressure, as the susceptibilities of 
our fellow-men are to the uncon- 
scious or conscious influence that we 
are throwing out upon them. Men 
are like instruments photographic. 
We are making pictures. We are 
throwing shadows and lines upon one, 
ten, scores, hundreds. Every time 
we come into the presence or con- 
sciousness of men something or other 
happens to them ; for men are as sen- 
sitive to receiving as they are in de- 
veloping influence. 

835. Beauty of Habit. — Nobody is 
so graceful in things that belong to 
the farm as the farmer. If you bring 
him to Boston and ask him to go into 
conditions that he is not accustomed 
to, he is awkward ; and the well 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



'83 



dressed, kid-gloved young man laughs 
to see how the poor old fellow acts. 
But now, take our young man and put 
him behind the plow, and see how he 
will act ! He is as awkward there as 
the old man was in the city. Put the 
farmer behind the plow, and see the 
elasticity with which he adapts him- 
self to its movements ! He observes 
what is coming, and prepares for it, 
and goes along with the utmost ease 
and composure. Where a man has 
had education and drill in the thing 
to which he is appointed, and does it 
unconsciously and automatically, ac- 
cording to its kind, it is beautiful. 

836. Limitations of Society. — God 
designed men to grow as trees grow in 
open pastures, fuU-boughed all 
around ; but men in society grow like 
trees in forests, tall and spindling, the 
lower ones overshadowed by the 
higher, with only a little branching, 
and that at the top. They borrow of 
each other the power to stand ; and if 
the forest be cleared and one be left 
alone, the first wind uproots it. 

837. Environment. — Because a bird 
lives in a chimney he need not be 
smutty. There is many a fine feather 
that lives in a chimney-corner. Nor 
are birds the only instance. 

838. Evils of the City. — We do not 
need to go to Vesuvius to see volca- 
noes. We have them all around us, 
in spite of the police and the common 
sense of the community. 

839. Difficulty of Right Living. — 
It is easy to strike a match and light a 
torch under ordinary circumstances ; 
but let a man, when the wick is wet, 
and the matches are damp, try to light 
a torch ; and if at last he succeeds in 
lighting it, let him, when the wind is 
blowing a gale, attempt to carry it 
across the unprotected Battery, at the 
sea-end of New York. He will find 
that what is easy in theory is impossi- 



ble in practice. And so it is with 
those that purpose to carry the light of 
example through the world. They 
find it almost impossible to do it in the 
midst of the many and varying influ- 
ences which abound. 

840. No Safety in Solitude.— To go 
alone into the wilderness is no safe- 
guard against evil. A man never 
went into the wilderness in this world 
that the devil did not go with him. In 
the city, the devil has so much to do 
that he cannot pay much attention to 
any one man ; but in the wilderness 
he has you ! It is a bad plan to keep 
by yourself too much. When you are 
under wholesome excitements in life, 
when you are made to vibrate and re- 
spond to genial influences, these things 
help you on. 

841. Uses of Solitude. — Alone-ness 
is to social life what rests are in music. 
Sounds following silence are always 
sweetest. 

The other day I got me to a solitary 
corner, where pine-trees, maples and 
spruces had leagued against the sun, 
and quite expelled him. There, upon 
a root swelling out above the ground, 
I sat me down, and, leaning against 
the trunk, I determined to spy cut 
what things are done in such places. 
So still was I that insects thought me 
a tree, and made a highway of my 
limbs. Nearly an hour I waited, and 
then came what I waited for — a wood- 
thrush — and perched his speckled 
breast right over against me in a near 
tree. He did not look in one place 
more than another, and so I knew that 
he believed himself alone. At once 
he began dressing his feathers. He 
ran his bill down through his ash- 
speckled breast, he probed the wings, 
and combed out the long coverts. He 
ruffled up his whole plumage and 
shook it robustly. Then, his solitary 
toilet completed, he flew into a tree 



184 



SOCIAL LIFE 



nearer llie road, where he could look 
out, but not be seen, and began his 
song. It was neither warble nor con- 
tinuous song, but a dainty phrasing, in 
single syllables, of such sweet and 
loving thoughts as solitude doth breed 
in pure and tender natures. And all 
this have I rehearsed, that I might say 
that none in hfe sing so sweetly as 
they who, hke the wood-thrush, sit on 
the twilight edge of sohtude and sing 
to those who pass by in the sunhght 
outside. 

842. Power of Association. — Do 
you know what the power of associa- 
tion is? Do you know how we have 
redeemed many things in human ex- 
perience from vulgarity, and made 
them as redolent as the gate of 
heaven ? For instance, do you know 
of any one thing that is so gross as 
eating? When you consider that a 
man throws into that hole which we 
call the mouth, chunk after chunk and 
grinds it, and disposes of it, is there 
anything that is more purely an animal 
operation ? And yet, is there any- 
thing more refined or fuller of sweet 
suggestion than the table ? Do we 
not use that word table to signify the 
blessings of the household ? We have 
so surrounded the table, by conversa- 
tion, and affection, and the higher 
offices of life, that we forget that gross 
fact around which they all of them 
cohere. These are the blossoms, and 
that is the root underground, as it 
were. This is a single illustration of 
a principle as broad as life : on the 
one hand, by association you can 
make the highest and noblest things 
most mean and beggarly ; while, on 
the other hand, you can surround the 
meanest and grossest things with the 
noblest and highest associations. 

843. Heart-Associations. — As the 
wind which serves to prostrate a plant 
is only a sower coming forth to sow its 



seeds, planting some of them in rock 
crevices, some by river courses, some 
among mossy stones, some under 
warm hedges, and some in garden and 
open field, — so it is with our experi- 
ences of hfe, that sway and bow us, 
either with joy or sorrow. They plant 
everything about us with heart-seeds. 
Thus a house becomes sacred. Every 
room has a thousand memories. 
Every door and window is clustered 
with associations. 

844. Early Surroundings. — After 
saying within myself, " It would have 
been impossible for me ever to have 
venerated relics," I bethought me of 
the Bible that lay by my side. In the 
book of Psalms there was a little 
paper folded up v^hich contained grass 
that grew upon the grave of my 
mother, in Litchfield. What was that 
but a relic ? It was of my mother. I 
was susceptible to relics in that direc- 
tion. Ah, I could have made a good 
Catholic. It only needed the right 
birth in the right country, with a right 
education and the right influences. 
How dependent we are upon our rear- 
ing ! 

845. Trials of the Strenuous Life. — 
Take a young man in the lecture- 
room, and let a single motive to 
wrongdoing be presented to him, and 
he can resist it while he is there before 
the professor. But throw him into 
life, where evil influences counteract 
all the good influences that are 
brought to bear upon him, night and 
day, in the household ; shove him into 
business, where tides of temptation 
set in upon him from every side ; let 
him go out of business into reeking 
political affairs, and be, week after 
week, and month after month, 
wrought upon by those excitements 
and corruptions ; let him be put 
through all the possible experiences of 
life in its various combinations, and 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



.85 



see whether it is as easy for him to 
carry himself exactly right, then, as 
it is when he addresses himself to 
some separate act or single line of 
conduct. There is a difference be- 
tween acting in the simplicity of indi- 
vidual choices, and acting in the 
complexity of unavoidable circum- 
stances ; and that is the reason why so 
many are good while they are still, 
and bad when they are active. 

846. Resolutions and Gravitation. — 
What a man means to do in the morn- 
ing, standing among its fresh dew- 
drops, and what he does do when he 
finds himself tossed hither and thither 
by the influences that operate upon 
him during the day, are very different 
things. He is like a man who sits on 
the top of the mountain and beholds 
the clear heavens and curtain-like 
clouds above, and the beautiful cham- 
paign country beneath. He is puri- 
fied, cleansed, and he says, "I will 
go down now a calmer and a better 
man." He starts, walking at first, 
but presently, finding the way smooth, 
beginning to run. He runs a little 
faster than he is aware of, so that 
when he comes to the steep down 
which he must pass he cannot stop, 
and he is glad to jump, and he jumps 
not knowing where he shall land, — 
and on he goes, now like a grass- 
hopper, now rolling and tumbling, 
and now jumping and running ; and 
when he reaches the bottom he has 
not taken one step that he meant 
to, he has taken a great many that 
he did not mean to, and his calm- 
ness has given way to heated ex- 
citement. And so, many men, sit- 
ting, as it were, on the mountain of 
contemplation, in the morning mean 
to act right, being inspired so to 
act by the beautiful and heavenly 
scenes which surround them ; and 
they undertake to go down the de- 



clivities of the day with circumspec- 
tion and propriety. If the day is a 
calm one they can do it ; but there 
are times when a man finds himself 
caught and whirled, and vexed and 
harassed, so that he hardly knows 
what he is or where he is, and scarcely 
keeps his identity till the day is 
ended. 

847. At Home and Abroad. — I 
know there are a great many persons 
who, when they go abroad, will do in 
London and Paris what they would 
not do in New York, saying, "No- 
body knows me ; my example is noth- 
ing, and I am going to indulge a curi- 
osity which I always had." But it 
struck me just the other way. I am 
somewhat subject to strong impulses 
of patriotism, and I felt, when I was 
abroad, in this way: "If I want to 
take any liberty, I choose to take it 
in my own country. I will not do in 
Paris and London anything that I will 
not do in New York and Boston." I 
had a very strong feeling that it was a 
good thing for a man, when he went 
home, and his friends or others asked 
him what special liberties he had 
taken, if he could say, " None ; I 
behave myself like a gentleman at 
home, and I behaved myself like a 
gentleman when I was abroad. I do 
what I think is right here, and I did 
what I thought was right there." 
The saying, " Among Romans you 
must do as the Romans do," contains 
a limited truth ; but it has been the 
devil's snare, teaching men to violate 
their sense of right and wrong. 

848. The Gentleman. — Can you 
make a gentleman by cutting a man 
in two, and building up the lower half, 
and leaving the upper and better half 
out? Is he a gentleman who merely 
conforms to a few starveling maxims 
of conduct and conventional arrange- 
ments of society to prevent overaction ? 



i86 



SOCIAL. LIFE 



And yet, what higher claim than this 
have many who pass themselves off 
for being gentlemen ? Manners and 
etiquette are too often but the fine 
color and empty shell of a thing which 
is dead. Color is good ; but hfe that 
makes color is a great deal better. 

849. Uses of Refinement. — Many 
people use their refinements as a 
spider uses his web — to catch the 
weak upon, that they may be merci- 
lessly devoured. Why not, rather, as 
the silk worm uses its web ? It lives 
to spin it, and dies that it may yield it 
for others' benefit. 

850. Simple Laws for Simple Lives. 
— A great many people despise simple 
laws and humble customs ; but they 
despise them much as the grajievine 
despises the pea-brush as a support, 
saying, " I that stretch up forty feet 
will take nothing but an oak-tree." 
Let the grapevine run as high as it 
wants to on the tree ; but the pea-vine 
is glad to run up on a pea-brush ; and 
it could not run on anything larger 
and taller. However much dignity 
there might be in so doing, that is not 
its nature. 

Now, institutions may be much 
lower than we see they ought to be ; 
laws and customs may be inferior, 
partial, and even injurious ; but, after 
all, they represent about the best rule 
of right that the great unthinking, 
undeveloped mass of the community 
can have ; and to treat them with 
contempt or with violence is so to treat 
the moral sense of the community. 

851. Selfish Aspiration. — The wick- 
edest people on earth are those who 
use a force of genius to make them- 
selves selfish in the noblest things; 
keeping themselves aloof from the 
vulgar, and the ignorant, and the un- 
known ; rising higher and higher in 
taste, till they sit, ice upon ice, on the 
mountain-top of eternal congelation. 



852. Lower Planes do not Include 
Higher. — Here was a man who was so 
strong in obedience to industrial and 
physical law that everybody stood out 
of his way and admired him, and 
everybody saw that, as far as he 
went, he got his reward. By and by, 
the time came when he wanted re- 
spect and consideration ; but he was 
made to feel that of all who were 
around him there was not one — that 
there was not a day-laborer nor a poor 
sempstress — who could not command 
more disinterested affection than he. 
He felt this, and he said, " 1 believe 
in total depravity. Men are brutes." 
That is to say, when there is a thorn- 
hedge along the border of a precipice, 
and a man runs into it and he gets 
scratched, he curses thorns, and says 
they are nuisances in creation. This 
man has kept the commercial law, the 
industrial law, and the physical law, 
but he vainly claims the fruits of 
obedience to social laws which he has 
never obeyed. 

853. Change of Social Relationships. 
— In the early history of the human 
race men owned everything, and no 
distinction was made between property 
in matter and property in persons. 
According to modern phraseology, 
property had not been "differen- 
tiated." A man's children and his 
servants were property to be bought 
and sold ; and at that early period a 
slave stood as high as a son. Slavery 
then, especially as a transition from 
destroying men in battle to saving 
their lives, and making them useful, 
and bringing them into the loose and 
inchoate early family, and putting 
them substantially in the position 
which the child occupied, was not 
very wrong ; on the other hand it 
was right, as relative to the then state 
of civilization. But now, when so- 
ciety has gone up stage by stage until 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



187 



the top and bottom are leagues apart 
and until all relationships are changed, 
we still see old doctors of divinity put- 
ting on their spectacles and hear them 
saying, "Abraham owned slaves in 
his day, and therefore it is right for us 
to own them in our day." Why, the 
stratum of society was not two inches 
thick in Abraham's time ; but now it 
is twenty leagues thick ! A thing may 
be right at the bottom which is not right 
at the top, in the relationships between 
man and man, and in the conse- 
quences of those relationships. 

2. Influence. 

854. Influence. — In some degree, 
upon all, conscious or unconscious, 
we shall exert an influence ; we cannot 
help it ; it is not a question of whether 
we will or will not, but of what shall 
be the influence that we exert. 

A flower may not know how sweet 
it is, but it is sweet ; and the perfume 
is wafted from it perpetually. A 
candle does not know what it is do- 
ing ; nevertheless its light is going out 
all the time, in every direction. A 
magnet has no voHtion ; yet it is for- 
ever searching and drawing appro- 
priate objects to itself. So it is with 
the human soul : it is put together and 
tempered in such a way that it is con- 
stantly radiating influences. Man is a 
double creature, and which is the more 
wonderful of the two sides we cannot 
tell — namely, the capacity to receive 
endless influences and appreciate them. 
or the capacity to give out endless in- 
fluences, consciously and uncon- 
sciously. 

855. Unnoticed Influence. — When 
we come in contact with men we do not 
know what they leave upon us. When 
spiders spin their webs in bushes they 
leave none that you can see at mid- 
day. But the next day the dew that 
has lodged upon them reveals them, 



and then you can see that the bushes 
were covered with them. And the 
influences which men exert upon you, 
you often cannot see when you re- 
ceive them. It is only when they are 
subsequently revealed in your life that 
you become aware of them. 

856. Unconscious Influences. — The 
locomotive, as it shoots over the road, 
showering myriads of sparks on every 
side, never stops to see on what flower, 
or herb, or grass, or water, they fall. 
It dashes ahead wholly ignorant of its 
effects on these things. And we 
thunder through life producing ten 
million spark-like effects of which we 
do not stop to take any note. We 
have no knowledge of the influences 
exerted by our imagination and affec- 
tions and appetites and desires and 
passions upon those around us. You 
could not, if you would, take any 
detailed account of all the bearings of 
your character and conduct upon 
others. But you can ascertain gen- 
erally how men are affected by you, 
and what side of yourself you are 
most using. 

857. Duty of Sweet Influence. — A 
man should carry himself in the world 
as an orange-tree would if it could 
walk up and down in the garden, — 
swinging perfume from every little 
censer it holds up to the air, 

858. Influence , the Measure of Value. 
— When our boys went forth, how 
many went never to return ! and how 
many hearts were carried with them 
that never came back again except 
broken ! How many a maiden sat 
waiting after the battle, long, and 
long, and long, with tears that counted 
the seconds ! How many sleepless 
nights were passed ! At last hope 
deferred had made the heart of one 
sick, and she consigned to darkness 
and an unknown grave him who was 
the light of her life, and who was to 



i88 



SOCIAL LIFE 



have been the leader and prophet of 
all her expected joy in the future. 

When all hope has gone, and all 
light with it, on a day that she looks 
not for, and by a hand that she knows 
not, there comes a letter. Her 
dimmed eyes will not let her read the 
superscription. Her heart is better 
than her head, and knows that it must 
be from him. It was but a little. 
" Mary, I was imprisoned, but I have 
escaped. This will be borne to you 
by a prisoner who escaped with me. 
I am on my way home. I shall be 
with you almost as soon as this." 
Where is he that can frame language 
for her overflowing love and thankful- 
ness ! What angel would not be glad 
to bear the thanksgiving of that virgin's 
heart before the throne of God, that 
its sweet perfume might be mingled 
with the praise of the saints ! And 
how, as she thanks God, and her heart 
lives again in a glorious resurrection 
out of despair, does her soul look at 
that letter! The letter is nothing. 
And yet, it has brought her to life 
again. That poor paper, that soiled 
page, those faint lines of ink — how 
does the feeling that they have pro- 
duced become ten thousand times 
more precious than they ! And yet, 
offer her, now, the diadem of a queen, 
the richest bracelet that eye ever 
rested on, for that letter, and how will 
she press it to her heart, and say, 
" Never — never ! " It is sweeter than 
life to her. It is poor, it is low, it is 
mean, until measured by the state of 
the soul which it has excited in the 
maiden's bosom. 

859. Influence of Self-Conscious- 
ness. — There is nothing worse in this 
world than self-consciousness, even 
from the body up. If you want to get the 
dyspepsia, follow down every mouthful, 
to know what it is doing. You will 
very speedily know ! And it would be 



a worse dyspepsia than this if a man 
were all the time to be thinking about 
the several acts of good that he was 
to perform. No, a man is to be so 
trained to sympathy, kindness, cour- 
tesy, good will, benevolence, that his 
unconscious life shall be a blessing- 
life to the men around about him. A 
man is not to think every time he 
does a thing. Now and then you 
will have to think ; but a thing that a 
man has to think of while he is doing 
it is imperfectly learned. 

860. Good-Nature. — Whatever be 
the cause or reason, is there anything 
else that so much blesses a man in 
human life as this voluntary or invol- 
untary good-nature ? Is there any- 
thing else that converts all things so 
much into enjoyment to him ? And 
then, what a glow and light he carries 
with him to others ! Some men come 
upon you like a cloud passing over 
the sun. You do not know what ails 
you, but you feel cold and chilly while 
they are about, and need an extra 
handful of coal on the fire whenever 
they tarry long. Others rise upon you 
like daylight. 

861. We Find What We Bring. — 
A cold cinder and a burning lamp 
started out, one day, to see what they 
could find. The cinder came back 
and wrote in its journal that the whole 
world was dark. It did not find a 
place wherever it went, in which there 
was light. Everywhere was dark- 
ness. The lamp when it came back, 
wrote in its journal, " Wherever I 
went it was light. I did not find any 
darkness in my journey. The whole 
world was light." What was the 
difference ? The lamp carried light 
with it, and illumined everything about 
it. The dead cinder carried no light, 
and found none. 

8G2. Personal Power. — The most 
potent influence that ever can rest 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



189 



upon the mind is that of another mind 
acting upon it. This is the highest 
influence of which we know anything 
at present. There is nothing, for ex- 
ample, that has power on your thought 
Hke a thinker thinking on you, as it 
were, or thinking to you. Nothing so 
arouses the affection as a great heart 
near yours. Like a fire, it sends out 
its warmth to all that are near it, 
whether they want it or not. 

863. Not the Church, but the Chris- 
tian. — It is heart on heart for salva- 
tion, that is to do the work. As dia- 
monds are ground best with their own 
powder, so men are best moulded by 
men. 

864. Everyday Preaching — After 
all, it is not the long sword of the Sab- 
bath, it is not the heavy artillery of 
the pulpit, that does the most effective 
work. It is the short sword of every 
day, it is the preaching of the truth 
out of season, and not in season, that 
does the greatest execution. For 
when men come to church, they come 
with their conscience-armor on, so 
that if the truth hits them it will glance 
off. And after a while they almost 
like the operation. And what is 
preaching out of season ? It is preach- 
ing as you conduct your business. It 
is the preaching of a father in a house- 
hold. It is the preaching that friend 
gives to friend. It is the preaching 
that the merchant who is true to his 
God gives to his customer. It is the 
preaching that you give to the sick, 
and to men who are in trouble. The 
best preaching in this world is what 
men do not mean to be preaching. 

865. Influence of Character. — Here 
is a boy that cannot help telling fibs. 
He knows it is sneaking, mean, dirty 
business ; still, he has got in the way 
of it, and habit seems to hold him. 
Send him with that man who is going 
over the Plains — a frank, free, open. 



courageous, manly fellow, who scorns 
dishonesty — just the kind of heroic 
nature that boys look up to. This boy 
becomes attached to him. He would 
give his life for him. He would follow 
him to death. He tries to imitate him, 
and scorns falsehoods and petty dis- 
honesties. What a power that man 
has over that boy ! How, by his ex- 
ample, he carries up his ambition ! 
How he enables him thus to lay aside 
little faults ! 

866. Force of Example. — Many of 
you have neighbors who would be 
greatly edified and strengthened if you 
were to array yourself with God's peo- 
ple. If you were to take that step, 
you do not know how many you would 
draw after you. If a river-boom or 
bar of tangled stuff breaks away, trunk 
after trunk, branch after branch, refuse 
of every description, that has been 
collecting for weeks, and months, and 
perhaps years — the whole raft goes 
after it. And there are men who 
stand like a boom in the community. 
One man backs up against another, 
and there they remain until the ob- 
struction is removed. And there are 
men in this congregation who, if they 
would honestly and openly avouch the 
name of Jesus Christ, and publicly 
bear witness to their faith in him, by 
uniting with the brethren here, would 
bring in scores with them. 

867. Nobleness Compels Admira- 
tion. — The bell when struck does not 
ring because it chooses to, but because 
it cannot help itself. And when a 
man beholds a noble trait, he admires 
it not because he wills to do it, but 
because he is so constituted that he 
must do it. 

868. Power of Personality. — If you 
go among men of strong natures, there 
is a certain vibration in you of a feel- 
ing which is strong in them. When 
you have been with some persons, you 



IQO 



SOCIAL LIFE 



feel finer, you feel lifted up. And yet 
they have not exhorted you. You 
have drunk the wine of being, and by 
it you are lifted up and strengthened. 

869. Motive Power of Enthusiasm. 
— Out of the fact that enthusiasm 
makes for efficiency, which is patent 
to any one who is observant, much 
false reasoning has grown. Men say, 
" What is the use of learning ? There 
is a man who is as learned as an en- 
cyclopedia, but who has spent all his 
life for nothing." It was not his learn- 
ing that prevented his doing anything, 
but the fact that his learning was not 
hot. Again they say, " What is the 
use of learning ? Here is a poor, ig- 
norant person — so ignorant that he 
cannot speak his mother-tongue cor- 
rectly ; and he has made his life count 
at every turn." It was not his ig- 
norance that led to his success. He 
took his nature, and put it in God's 
furnace, and raised it to a white heat ; 
and it was the heat that did the work, 
not his ignorance. 

Another man has amplitude of both 
learning and culture, and his whole 
mind is intensely active, and with this 
equipment he goes forward, and is 
mighty for achievement. He is a 
Luther. He stands, as Paul stood and 
stands, powerful in his influence over 
men. White heat in the brain gives 
power. 

870. Negative Goodness. — In the 
thousand pictures of the Holy Family, 
Joseph is represented as a venerable 
man, standing a little apart, lost in 
contemplation, while Mary and Eliza- 
beth caress the child Jesus. In this 
respect, Christian art has, it is proba- 
ble, rightly represented the character 
of Joseph. He was but a shadow on 
the canvas. Such men are found in 
every community, — gentle, blameless, 
mildly active, but exerting no positive 
influence. Except in one or two vague 



implications, he early disappears from 
sight. 

871. Naturalness of Religious Re- 
vivals. — Many have ridiculed revivals, 
and even good men have looked 
askance upon them, as being of human 
device, and have pointed out all their 
defects and miscarriages, and have 
frequently brought them into contempt. 
But they are founded on a natural 
law, and a beneficent one. . . . Over 
and above the individual power of 
man's will is the collective power in 
which he floats, of the wills of all 
those round about him. Business 
avails itself of this. Men have sub- 
stituted a modern word for prosperity ; 
it is called a " business boom" — and 
a boom, I suppose, is where after com- 
paratively shallow channels there is 
snow melted in the mountain or run- 
ning off the hills, and the river fills up 
its channels, and comes rushing down 
with irresistible power, sweeping every- 
thing before its current. The " boom " 
or bar is broken by the flood, and 
that process is also called a " boom." 
Now, when religious sentiment itself 
comes in its turn to that great possi- 
bility, namely, the increment of moral 
impulse, discernment, purpose, by the 
concurrent sympathy and movement 
of hundreds and of thousands in re- 
vivals, it is the highest and noblest 
form which this movement ever takes. 

872. Community of Feeling. — A 
single stick does not create much 
warmth ; a fagot more ; a bonfire 
more yet ; and a furnace melts all 
things in its glow and heat. A single 
penitent limps ; a thousand men, all 
of them feeling the pressure of wrong- 
doing in the past, and the desire for 
elevation and inspiration, reflect their 
feeling one upon the other, and it be- 
comes easy for each to do that which 
would otherwise be almost impossi- 
ble. 



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191 



873. Public Opinion. — One man's 
heart beating against yours may be 
little to you ; but when it is the echo 
of a thousand hearts, you cannot 
resist it. A single snowflake — who 
cares for it? But a whole day of 
snowflakes, obliterating the land- 
marks, drifting over the doors, gather- 
ing upon the mountains to crash in 
avalanches — who does not care for 
that ? Private opinion is weak, but 
pubhc opinion is almost omnipo- 
tent. 

874. Individuals and Communities. 
— What is a drop of water of itself? 
What can be more harmless ? What 
is weaker? What is less potent for 
any effect? It is mist, invisible. It 
rises through the imperceptible paths 
of the air, and hangs unseen in the 
heavens, till the cold strikes it, and it 
congeals into clouds, and falls in the 
form of rain, perhaps upon the moun- 
tain's top, and is sucked up by the 
greedy earth. Still sinking through 
the earth, it reaches the line of the 
rocks, from whose sides it oozes out 
and trickles down, when, finding 
other drops as weak as itself, they 
unite their forces ; and the sum of the 
weakness of all these drops goes to 
make the rill ; which flows on, making 
music as it flows, until it meets counter 
streams. These, combined, form the 
river ; the river forms the estuary ; 
and the estuary the ocean itself. And 
now, when God has marshaled the 
sum of the weakness of myriad drops 
together, they lift the mightiest ship as 
if it were but a feather, and play with 
the winds as if they were mere instru- 
ments of sport. 

We in our singleness, in our in- 
dividuality, are weaker than a drop 
of water, and more unstable ; but as 
gathered together in the great ocean 
of life, as kept together by the mighty 
currents which God's providences 



make, we attain to a might that makes 
life not ignoble, but sublime. 

3. Sympathy. 

875. Social Solidarity. — Trees in 
forests are able to stand under severe 
storms because they protect each 
other by their mass ; but when the 
settler's axe has cleared away the 
forest, leaving here and there a stately 
tree, such trees cannot stand. The 
first strong wind that comes doubles 
them over, and they go down. 

And men standing alone go down 
quicker than trees. They are shal- 
lower-rooted; and if they stand they are 
obliged to stand by mutual helpfulness. 

876. Men Need Other Men. — You 
cannot make one stick alone burn ; 
happy and small are the sticks if two 
will burn, but three and four and five 
laid together will kindle ; and more 
and more the heat and flame mount as 
you add the fuel. Now, single men 
must have extraordinary capacity, 
education, power of evolution, to de- 
velop their highest and their best. 
For, in order to have the best of our- 
selves, we need not simply the power 
of will and of taste and of feeling in 
ourselves ; we need to have an atmos- 
phere about us which quickens these 
powers and stimulates them. 

877. Man's Brotherhood. — There 
are many persons that we are not 
ashamed of as acquaintances ; but we 
should not wish to go further than 
that. There are many that we should 
not be ashamed of as servants and la- 
borers for us, and with us; but we 
should not choose to go further than 
that. The declaration, however, is, 
that Christ was not ashamed to call 
them brethren. And to call them 
brethren was to unite them to himself 
in the most intimate relationship. 

878. Humanity in Trouble. — Na- 
ture teaches us to bear the burdens of 



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those whom we love. But this spirit 
should go out, quickened by the spirit 
of Christianity, beyond our own 
household. Every human being 
brought to our hands in trouble is a 
messenger of God. His trouble is a 
letter of introduction, his nature is a 
declaration of brotherhood, and his 
destiny links him to us with an 
irrefragable chain. 

879. The Body of Christ. — A 
man who should sit down to the 
communion-table, having bitterness 
against his brother in his heart, would 
he not do wrong? "Yes," you an- 
swer at once. But it is " communion " 
every day. The body of Christ is 
wherever human beings are, and he 
who has any bitterness against a 
brother is always committing sacri- 
lege. 

880. The Balm of Sympathy. — 
There are ears that hunger for sym- 
pathizing words. There are others 
that, while deaf to these words, are 
not insensible to presence. To hold 
your peace in the shadow of another's 
grief is oftentimes more balm and con- 
solation than anything else you can 
do. When a man is in trouble, and it 
seems as though the world is sweeping 
away from him, go and stand by his 
side and he will never forget that, — 
not if he is generous. Ah ! when the 
heart has been bruised through and 
through there is no poultice like an- 
other heart put and held right on it. 

881. Faults in Others. — When a 
man is yet under the smart and tor- 
ment of some wrong he has com- 
mitted, when it may be scorching 
him, or is eating up the very vitals of 
his life, that is no time to preach to 
him. What he wants is balm, quiet. 
Complain of him afterwards ; but the 
moment when a man is at the very 
focal point of exquisite suffering by 
reason of his own fault, that is the 



time for one to pour in the oil and the 
wine. What if the good Samaritan 
had said to the man that went down 
from Jerusalem to Jericho, " You fool, 
you, what did you go down this way 
for? Didn't you know that it was in- 
fested with robbers ? You knew that 
you had no business to go this way." 

882. Love Cushioning Conscience. 
— Hospitahty does not ask you to sit 
on a log because a log is necessary to 
the building of a house. I would as 
lief sit on the square end of a log all 
my life, as to live with men who, 
though they have conscience, are 
harsh and unlovely, and hard because 
there is nothing in them to cover up 
that conscience. 

883. Intelligent Inhumanity. — This 
scene [question of the Pharisees about 
healing on the Sabbath], slight as it 
seems in the rehearsal, went to the 
very heart of Jesus. To him nothing 
seemed so repulsive as the soul of an 
intelligent man coiled up in its selfish- 
ness and striking at the poor and weak. 
Sins of excess, unbridled passions, 
vices and crimes, he rebuked with 
much of pity as well as of sternness ; 
but intelligent inhumanity roused his 
utmost indignation. 

884. Mutual Helpfulness. — Many 
persons are caught with the most 
superficial contradiction. In the sec- 
ond verse, it says, " Bear ye one an- 
other's burdens" ; and in the fifth it 
says, " Every man shall bear his own 
burden." As if both of them could 
not be true ! As if a man carrying a 
burden for which he is especially re- 
sponsible, might not have it lightened 
somewhat by one who walked by his 
side and helped him ! As if a little 
child carrying a heavily laden basket 
— which it was his task and business to 
carry, and which he had to take care 
of — might not be helped by another 
child walking by his side, and taking 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



193 



hold of the handle ; so that it might 
be said to one of them, " This is your 
burden, and you must see to it ; " and 
to the other, " Help him with his 
burden." To bear 07ie another's bur- 
dens does not mean to take them off 
from one another's shoulders, but to 
help each other to carry them. 

885. Comfort of Mere Sympathy. — 
Jesus went to Gethsemane on purpose, 
and carried thither the most sympa- 
thetic of his disciples, and set them 
down while he went on beyond, and 
said to them, " Now watch, for I 
go yonder to pray." Yet what could 
they do? . . . What can a little 
child do that looks up into the face of 
the mother, and sees her tears drop- 
ping one by one, and knows not what 
ails her, and still less knows how to 
comfort her, and can only once in a 
while climb up into her lap and say, 
" Don't cry, mother ! " Were the dis- 
ciples any stronger than that ? And 
could they comfort Christ any more 
than in that blind way in which chil- 
dren's sympathy comforts parents, — or 
sometimes heightens their sorrow ? 
Since to watch with Christ could not 
have been to give him strength, nor to 
interpret anything to him, nor to enter 
freely and fully into his feelings, it 
could only be this, that the heart of 
Jesus in his great trial would be com- 
forted if those whom he loved and 
who loved him were present and in 
sympathy with him. 

886. Soul-Sympathy Unappreciated. 
— There is no spendthrift like the 
heart. It does not know economy, it 
will not learn, but gives all, always. 
There are a great many men who be- 
lieve in morality ; but they do not un- 
derstand the affluence of real religion, 
what may be called the fragrance of 
the heart, the odor of the soul, in its 
love. There are men who, if you go 
to visit the poor and the unfriended 



with tracts, with Bibles, with the 
ministration of sacred literature, to 
sing with them and to pray with them 
— "Well," say these men, " that's a 
pretty distribution ; why don't you 
take down a barrel of flour? Why 
don't you carry them something to eat 
— some tea. some sugar, some coffee ? 
Why don't you send them coal?" 
Anything which a horse can draw in 
a cart— they understand that. But 
when it comes to going down there 
and sympathizing, they say, " Oh yes, 
sympathy, sympathy ! " They under- 
stand the market part of it ; but the 
other part is smoke to them — all 
smoke. Yet suppose both be had ! 

887. Motives, not Acts. — If there is 
anything pungent in odor that I do 
not like it is the malodorous Smart- 
weed ; but when a poor little wretch 
who didn't know the difference be- 
tween fine flowers and common ones 
wanted to bring me something, and 
brought me a piece of that, how sweet 
it smelt for his sake ! It is not the 
gift, but the feehng in the one who be- 
stows the gift, that is to be regarded. 

888. Practical Sympathy.— When 
the surgeon first sees the suffering of 
his patient, he sympathizes with him 
so that his arm can scarcely perform 
the functions of skill to which it is 
called ; but soon he overcomes his 
agitation, and goes through the opera- 
tion with a steady hand. The first 
feeling is right ; and when he has 
mastered it it is not destroyed. It has 
merely changed by going from the 
primary into the secondary state ; and 
that which in the beginning almost 
unfitted him for his duty, has now be- 
come a motive of action. He no 
longer has the emotion, but he is a 
great deal more sympathetic. Kind 
men are not those that have the emo- 
tion of kindness merely, but those 
that know how to take that emotion 



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into the practical state, and carry it 
through Ufe. 

889, Christian Courtesy. — " Now," 
says the apostle, " whatever has been 
brought out anywhere, since the world 
began, of qualities that will make you 
appear honorable and noble before 
men, that follow." . . . 

Under this head come social eti- 
quette, pohteness, obligingness, a 
thousand virtues of intercourse among 
men. If a venerable man, sitting in 
the cars, sees an ill-clad, helpless and 
stricken woman with her burden, and 
sits still, perhaps nobody says any- 
thing about it : but if he rises as a 
patriarch, treating her as a father 
would treat his daughter, and says, 
" Madame, sit here," she, with blush- 
ing diffidence and modesty says, 
" Thank you " — which a great many 
lordlier women forget to say ; and one 
looking on that scene would ask, 
"Who is that gentleman?" " O, 
that is Deacon Sobersides, of So-and- 
so." " Well, I don't care whether he 
is a deacon or not, he is a good man. 
That is what I like to see." It may 
be that a man knows the catechism 
by heart (I have known men to sur- 
vive it!) and stands very high; but 
after all, in the eyes of the average 
car-full, such an act as I have just de- 
scribed would be more impressive as 
to the reality of his religion than a 
thousand sermons. 

8go. Social Contagion of Spiritual- 
ity. — Did you ever go into the pres- 
ence of a good man, and not feel an 
inclination to do what you saw him 
do? The body itself takes tlie con- 
tagion and does it. You cannot see a 
man climb without climbing too. 
You instantly attempt to reproduce 
the same squirming movements which 
he makes. You cannot see a mother 
talk to a child that you do not imag- 
ine that you are talking to a child, 



and move your lips as though you 
were. You are grave or humorous 
according as those whom you are with 
are grave or humorous. If you go 
into a family where there is sorrow, 
there will be a shadow over your feel- 
ings. You will come by sympathy 
into their state of mind — and that is 
right and true and noble. We tend 
by sympathy to take on the feelings 
of those with whom we are associated. 
So, bring a person into a meeting 
where God's people are singing, 
where they are praying, where they 
are speaking and rejoicing, and he 
will be insensibly caught, and his 
deficiency, his want of producing- 
power, will be wonderfully helped by 
the sympathetic influence there. 

891. Life Inspires Life. — Take re- 
vivals that we have had in our own 
prayer-meetings, when brethren rose 
up here, and with a few stammering 
words, punctuating their sentences 
with tears, told what God had done 
for their souls. How hushed it was ! 
How men of hard hearts shed tears! 
How many that had resisted sermons 
and doctrines, went home, and said, 
" I believe that it is time for me to do 
something." That is it, to do some- 
thing ; to be something ! After all, it 
is when God, by the Holy Ghost, 
awakens a higher life in a man's soul, 
and that life inspires another person's 
life, that the best and easiest work is 
done. 

4. Character and Reputation. 

892. Nature of Character. — Char- 
acter is not a massive unit ; it is a 
fabric, rather. It is an artificial whole 
made up by the interply of ten thou- 
sand threads. Every faculty is a 
spinner, spinning every day its threads, 
and almost every day threads of a 
different color. Myriads of webbed 
products proceed from the many ac- 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



195 



live faculties of a human soul, and 
character is made up by the weaving 
together of all these innumerable 
threads of daily life. Its strength is 
in its numerous elements. 

893. Fact and Fame. — If it is a lit- 
tle harder to build up character than 
reputation, it is so only in the begin- 
ning. For mere reputation, like a 
poorly built house, will cost as much 
for patching and repairs as would 
have made it thorough at first. 

894. Profitless Explanations. — The 
average and general influence of a 
man's teaching will be more mighty 
than any single misconception, or 
misapprehension through misconcep- 
tion. A man might run around, lilce 
a kitten after its tail, all his hfe, if he 
were going about explaining all his 
expressions and all he had written. 
Let them go. They will correct them- 
selves. 

895. Character and Countenance. — 
God sends Experience to paint men's 
portraits. The settled face of Wash- 
ington — the trials of the Jersey winter, 
the sufferings at Cambridge, the con- 
flicts with Congress, wrought it out. 

896. Reputation. — What a man's 
character is, that, with exceptional in- 
stances, his reputation will be — a 
thing that few men can be made to 
believe. Men believe that they can 
have one character and another repu- 
tation. Men believe that they can be 
proud, but that they can so deftly 
conceal it that they shall have the 
reputation of being good fellows — not 
proud. Men believe that they can 
lie, but that they can have the reputa- 
tion of being truth-speakers — they 
mean to do it so deftly, so dexter- 
ously. Men believe that they can be 
impure, and yet have virtuous reputa- 
tions — they mean to have such skill, 
such adroitness, in these things. But 
an odious stench might just as well 



attempt to pass itself off in life for a 
grateful perfume, as degraded moral 
qualities attempt to pass themselves 
off for their antitheses. 

897. Reputation and Character. — 
All that in you which is simply the re- 
flection of other people's thoughts 
about you, is a mere shadow ; and it 
avails but little. What you are stands 
by you. If you are mean, a reputa- 
tion for generosity will not spare you 
long. If you are stingy, I do not care 
what your reputation is, you cannot 
be so munificent in giving away that 
the gaunt bones of your stinginess will 
not stick out. People who give for 
praise, get what they give for ; they 
get their reward for a while. Our 
Master, in speaking of those who 
made long prayers, said, "Verily, 
they have their reward." "Whatso- 
ever a man soweth, that shall he also 
reap." Where men seek to build up 
a reputation without any concern as 
to their character, it is but a very little 
time that they deceive anybody but 
their own selves. They do not de- 
ceive their fellow-men, nor God, nor 
the devil. 

8g8. Love of Praise. — It is not your 
fault if you have the element of ap- 
probativeness, but it is your fault if 
you suffer it to feed on despicable 
food. Train it to desire approbation 
for things that are noble and just, for 
doing, intensely, whatever is disinter- 
ested among men. and for things that 
other men cannot do. Task yourselves 
as men should do, and not like sullen 
boys or puling girls. Have such a 
conception of manhood in Christ Jesus 
that you would scorn praise for things 
that are less than noble. Strike a 
line through the head, and seek praise 
for things that are represented above 
the line and not below it. 

899, Beginnings of Character. — 
There is not one of the drops which 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



go to make the Hudson River that has 
not oozed out of some mountain or 
hillside and helped to form some rill 
or some spring. There is a mighty 
volume of water here ; but it began in 
single drops. And character, al- 
though in the later periods of life it 
may seem to be a large thing, has its 
origin in little thoughts, little motives, 
little actions, little self-denials, and 
you cannot be too cautious in respect 
to these minor matters of integrity. 

900. Commercial Credit and Char- 
acter. — If men use money, paying as 
they go in all their business, then so 
far as business is concerned there is 
no difference between one man and 
another, because the debauchee, with 
his pockets full of gold, goes into the 
market and stands as high as the 
saint, paying dollar for dollar. But 
when credit is in question, character 
comes up, and men do not stand 
alike. The man who has character 
gets credit, and the man who has no 
character gets none. Credit, there- 
fore, is a moral premium paid to men 
for character, and it is of transcendent 
importance both to individuals and to 
communities that are struggling from 
a low to a high estate. 

901. A Good Name. — A good name 
is one which, when mentioned, awak- 
ens among those who hear it honoring 
thoughts, lively emotions of pleasure, 
respect, gratitude, confidence, and 
even love and enthusiasm. It is not 
a dry, leafless thing, like a plant in an 
herbarium — the faded remembrance 
of beauty ; it is a hving, energetic 
force. It stands before you like a 
presence. It is, in short, the impres- 
sion which your real life has produced 
on the judgment, the heart and the 
imagination of men who have known 
you. 

go2. Value of a Good Name. — I 
once bore a package of letters to 



Abraham Lincoln at Washington in 
the interest of a friend. There were 
letters from judges, from lawyers, and 
from merchants, a score of them, most 
handsomely prepared. As I gave 
them to the President, he asked, 
" Whom are they from ? What are 
the names?" I told him. He said, 
" Hand me that one " (indicating the 
one he wished). I handed it to him, 
and he took it and read it. and said, 
" I do not care for the rest — that is 
enough." 

903. Social Connections. — Among 
the ways which men employ to sustain 
their respectability, none is more com- 
mon than an exhibition of their social 
connections. One whose cousin is a 
governor, whose uncle is a general, 
whose brother has been to Congress, 
is helped to stand well in society. 
Reputation is of the nature of a vine, 
and our reputable relatives are so 
much brush or trellis on which we 
run up. 

904. Reputation from Everyday 
Life. — As a man sometimes has in his 
house a well-furnished room which he 
never uses except on state occasions, 
when he entertains friends, with stiff- 
ness and formaUty and sumptuous- 
ness ; so men have certain imaginary 
and heroic virtues which they keep in 
their romance-chamber, and in which 
they like now and then to dress them- 
selves. But, after all, it is those 
qualities which we use every day, 
those articles with which our living- 
room is furnished, that go to make up 
the impressions of men about us. 
These are the materials which are 
operating in the production, not only 
of our character, but of the shadow of 
it which men behold, and which con- 
stitutes our name. 

905. Self- Judgment Through Others. 
— Suppose a hedgehog should go 
about saying, " Do you think my 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



197 



quills are as long and as sharp as 
they used to be ? " I think a person 
would know, if a hedgehog touched 
him, whether his quills were long and 
sharp or not. If you want help in 
self-examination you may get it right 
by you, from the people that know 
you. You are to judge of yourself 
largely by the impression which you 
make upon them. 

go6. Human Opinion an Uncertain 
Gauge. — The reflection of other men's 
good-will towards us we use more than 
anything else to estimate our charac- 
ters by. Those who rely on this alto- 
gether are like buoys that are always 
on the surface of the water, but that 
move with it as it rises and falls with 
the ocean-tides. We lie like floats on 
the world-tide, which goes in and out, 
and up and down, and we have no 
gauge on the shore to show what is our 
absolute condition. It is merely rela- 
tive to the fluctuations of the ever- 
shifting, ever-changing tide of human 
feeling. 

907. Depth of Character. — At what 
stage of development are you, my 
brethren ? Have you ever sounded 
the depths of your soul to know what 
they are ? You will see men in ships 
approaching the shore, or in rivers 
when the waters run low, with their 
sounding-lead, calling out to the pilot 
and the captain, " Eight fathoms, nine 
fathoms, seven fathoms, twelve fath- 
oms." They are steering by the re- 
port of the water in which they are 
floating. What would be the word 
sent back, if you were to take sound- 
ings of your soul ? . . . Do not be 
content with low measures of grace. 

5. Friendship. 

908. Intimacy. — Sudden intimacies 
are always shallow. Wells quickly 
dug are quickly dry. 



gog. Friendships. — Ordinarily friend- 
ships are mere commercial arrange- 
ments. They are bargains between 
the easy affections, one saying to an- 
other, " You make me happy, and I 
will make you happy ; and as long as 
you make me happy, you are my 
friend ; but when you cannot do it any 
longer, llien we go apart." That is 
the way of the world. What is gen- 
erally called friendship, is an ex- 
change of commodities of happiness. 
For the most part, hearts are shopped, 
friendship is a bargain, and friends 
are traffickers. But there are friend- 
ships that are higher ; and there are 
friends that are so bound together that 
if one is sick the other is by his side ; 
and the sickness of the one is al- 
most as if it were in the body of the 
other. There are friendships that are 
as pure and as deep as it is possible to 
be ; and they have the peculiar qual- 
ity of serving in them to such a degree 
that each friend is the slave of the 
other. Each knows how to give 
everything for the other. 

gio. Broken Friendships. — Although 
a cracked friendship, like a cracked 
tumbler, may be cemented, the mo- 
ment you put it into hot water the 
bottom will fall out, or it will come to 
pieces. 

911. Rarity of Friendships. — You 
cannot have a great many real 
friendships — mutual bonds of service. 
They are too costly. There is not 
time to cultivate many of them. One 
or two are about as many as a man 
can attend to in this world. You can 
have kindly feelings towards multi- 
tudes ; but when it comes to the mat- 
ter of serving, and when your con- 
science is another man's conscience, 
and when your heart, like a bell, is 
struck every time he is in trouble, it 
is about as much as you can find time 
to do to take care of that one man. 



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912. Friendship, a Figure of God. — 
A person spends days and days in 
disinterested labor for a friend. He 
puts his wliole heart in it. We count 
nothing too good to sacritice for a 
friend. You do not love, unless you 
are willing to suffer for what you 
love ; and the depth of your love is in 
proportion to what you are willing to 
suffer. A person gives himself up to 
some faithful labor of love in behalf 
of a friend, and while engaged therein, 
there comes to him a conception of 
what the nature of that God is who 
gives himself, in heaven, on earth, 
through time, and through eternity, 
an everlasting and willing sufferer for 
all. Here rises before him an illustra- 
tion of the teachings of the Gospel. 
While you are endeavoring to follow 
out the commands of God in his word, 
oftentimes there springs up within you 
some sense of the Divine nature clearer 
and more luminous than you have 
ever had it before. 

6. Pains and Uses of Society. 

913. Social Suffering. — A man com- 
mits a crime against the public law, 
and when at last it is discovered he 
may brazen it out. It is the wife whose 
whole nature is shocked. It is the 
children on whom disgrace has come. 
It is the church in which he was an 
officer, it is the neighborhood where 
he was held in respect and affection, 
where the suffering is felt. The men 
that are outside of him suffer more 
than he does. 

The law of our social connection, 
therefore, carries with it a liability to 
suffering. 

914. Dishonesty Burdens Society. 
— I suppose that if you were to see an 
old warrior again in our times, cum- 
bered with his vast defensive armor — 
his breast-plate, his greaves, his back- 
piece, his ponderous shield, his soUd 



spear, his weighty sword — you would 
laugh him to scorn, and say, " Why, 
he spends more than half his strength 
in carrying his armor ! " That is just 
the condition in which society is walk- 
ing to-day. The cunning, the lies, 
the cheatings, the dishonesties in busi- 
ness and society, are such that every 
store has to be built with thicker walls, 
stronger locks, and bolts, and bars, 
and chains, than would otherwise be 
necessary ; and there is need of more 
watchmen and policemen ; and all 
the apparatus of government is doubled 
and trebled and quadrupled. A mul- 
titude of extra appliances are required 
to fight against the simple tendency to 
dishonesty and untruth. Teach men 
to speak the truth and to deal honestly 
with each other, and society may dis- 
possess itself of more than half its 
weights and burdens. 

915. Vicarious Penalty. — As a gen- 
eral fact, four-fifths of all the men 
that go to poor-houses go there on ac- 
count of the violation of natural laws. 
Vice carries them there. They have 
swum there on the turbid stream of 
wickedness. And when they are 
lodged there, they are clothed, and 
fed, and warmed, and doctored, and 
supported, from your pocket and from 
mine, who have not transgressed. 
The poor-house is a form of vicarious 
suffering for the whole community. 
We stand between men who have 
transgressed natural law and the full 
penalty of their transgression. 

916. The Wastes of Society. — 
Who pays for vice ? Not the vicious ; 
the virtuous pay for it. Who pay the 
taxes of the community ? The men 
whose vices make taxes needful are 
the leakages. This community is a 
vast hull, and at every seam there is 
a leaking, and leaking and leaking. 
Whose work is it to caulk up? Why, 
it is the industrious man that pays for 



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199 



the waste of the shiftless man, in the 
long run. It is the vice of the com- 
munity that is the tax-gatherer of the 
community. It is drinking, gambling, 
passion, appetite, debauchery, the in- 
fraction of social and Divine laws, 
that lay the hard hand of tyranny and 
exaction on the community. If it 
were not for good men, communities 
would break down under the vices 
and crimes of bad men. 

917. Social Gain through Suffer- 
ing. — Men's mistakes are the next 
men's blessings. One man lost, the 
next man won't go that road ; he sees 
that the first man is lost, and he takes 
another, and escapes, and others fol- 
low him ; thus the sufferer opened a 
way by his suffering which saved 
scores, nations, ages from suffering. 
In the same way ages suffer ; one 
age suffers for the next. Civilization 
is the generic accumulation of the 
trials, mistakes, ascertainments, and 
victories of the generations that have 
gone before. Look at any stable civil 
government to-day ; how many thou- 
sands of men have shed their blood 
for it ! If there be anything dear to 
man to-day it is liberty of thought ; 
but how far back is that time in which 
men, pressed down by superstition, 
and threatened by the finger of the 
law of the priesthood, had no liberty 
of thought ? They were like the swine 
that eats what is poured into the trough 
for it. Once men were padlocked 
when they thought, felt ; they had no 
right to speak. That at last has been 
triumphed over ; but what seas of 
blood the world went through before 
men had liberty of conscience and 
of speech ! 

918. Social Duty of Healthful Liv- 
ing. — So are we put together that one 
thread in a woolen fabric might as 
well say to its neighbor thread, "I 
will rot, it is not your business, it is 



my lookout," as for a man to say 
that he has a right to injure his own 
body. Does not the rotting of one 
thread cause a hole to appear in the 
fabric ? The strength of the whole 
web requires that each thread should 
be sound ; and the family, the city, 
the state, demand that every man 
should maintain himself in the full 
proportion of his true manhood. 

919. Social Liability to Disaster. — 
Some men make me think of a mouse 
in a field, that says, " I will dig so 
deep that nothing shall find me. I 
will build my house behind this tuft 
of grass, and nobody shall ever sus- 
pect that here is a mouse's house." 
And already, at the other end of the 
field, the ox-team and the plow are 
moving, and soon they sweep past, 
burying the little house, mouse and 
all, so deep that he never knows 
what has happened to hiui. But such 
talk from a mouse in a field is wisdom 
itself compared to the declaration of a 
man who says, " I mean to make no 
mistakes ; I will be rich, and strong, 
and wise, and high ; and calamities 
shall not touch me." But such men 
are often overborne and destroyed ; 
not for want of wisdom, not by reason 
of unwise planning on their part, but 
because they are connected with other 
men who do not plan wisely. You 
may build your own house well, and 
your neighbor may build his so that 
yours shall sag in spite of you. Un- 
der such circumstances, it is not your 
carelessness, but his, that brings your 
house down. Every man is liable to 
disasters beyond his control. 

920. One Man's Power for Evil. — 
You do not need to have every in- 
strument of an orchestra out of tune 
to have discord. Let there be a hun- 
dred instruments, and let one of them 
fall a single note below the key, and 
that one instrument will destroy the 



200 



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harmony of the other ninety-nine, 
however perfect that harmony may 
be. And one selfish man is enough 
to destroy the peace of a thousand. 
And he can do it, without doing it on 
purpose ; that is, without setting out 
to do it. In this world a man does 
not need to plan for wickedness. He 
needs only to neglect goodness. The 
rest comes of itself. 

921. Society's Right to Control 
Conduct. — Every wicked man is a 
gigantic, living pump, drawing from 
infernal wells ichor that is distributed 
throughout the whole community. It 
does not stop with the individual. 
Therefore society has a right to re- 
strain men who do wrong. 

922. Active and Passive Evil. — A 
man in the night hears the cry of fire, 
and sees the destroying element play- 
ing upon and in his own dwelling, and 
right before his eyes that structure 
within which he has been reared goes 
down to the ground in an hour, and 
becomes an ash-heap. But fire is not 
the only thing that will destroy a man's 
house. It will take a little longer for 
neglected leaks to do it. It will take 
a little longer for dry rot in the tim- 
bers to do it. Just give them a little 
longer time, and the unmended roof, 
the broken windows, the various 
causes of decay, will destroy your 
dwelling. Let it alone, and sooner or 
later it will go down. 

Where the welfare of other men de- 
pends upon us neglect rises not simply 
to mischief, or ruin, as the case may 
be, but to criminality. 

923. Diversity of Social Life. — You 
cannot put men together as you put 
together a carpenter's logs when he 
has chiseled and jointed them. So- 
ciety has to be made up of free men, 
and a free man is a largely branched 
man all around. That government is 
coming more and more into vogue 



which rejoices in diversity, and which 
not merely says that one man's liberty 
shall not prevent another man's liberty, 
but demands that he shall accommo- 
date himself and his neighbor likewise. 

924. Personal Rights. — Men's rights 
are a great deal of trouble to them. 
They assert them and get them, and 
then they don't know what to do with 
them. A man's rights, half of them, 
are meant to give away. It is my 
right to have the best chair in my 
house — if anybody contradicts it (ex- 
cept one) ! It is my right to claim it 
— and then to yield it, to age or to 
guest or to womanhood. The beati- 
tude of your rights is, they are your 
benevolences. And the law of social 
unity is this law of assertion of a man's 
individuality, and the use of that in- 
dividuality as a benevolence for those 
that are around about him. 

925. Speaking the Truth in Love. — 
Manner is much. In the early aboli- 
tion days two men went out preach- 
ing, one an old Quaker, and another 
a young man full of fire. When 
the Quaker lectured, everything ran 
along very smoothly, and he carried 
the audience with him. When the 
young man lectured, there was a row, 
and stones, and eggs. It became so 
noticeable that the young man spoke 
to the Quaker about it. He said, 
" Friend, you and I are on the same 
mission, and preach the same things ; 
and how is it that while you are re- 
ceived cordially I get nothing but 
abuse?" The Quaker replied, "I 
will tell thee. Thee says, ' If you do 
so and so, you shall be punished,' and 
I say, ' My friends, if you will not do 
so and so, you shall not be pun- 
ished.' " They both said the same 
things, but there was a great deal of 
difference in the way they said it. 

926. Disagreement without Quar- 
rel. — When I go into my grounds. 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



201 



and prune my trees, I always cut 
from the bottom up. My theory is 
that the sun, striking on the cut place, 
cracks it, so that the rain, falling on 
the part thus laid open, runs under 
the bark and rots it ; therefore I cut 
up ; and in that way the wound is 
protected. But my neighbor cuts 
from the top down. He says the sun 
heals the wound quicker, by thicken- 
ing the juices more rapidly. At the 
same time, we never quarrel on the 
subject. I think my way is the best, 
and he thinks his is the best, but we 
never throw stones at each other. 

927. Living Needs Learning. — Life 
is a trade, to be learned ; a profession, 
to be gained by education ; an art, 
requiring long drill. 

928. Labor Unions and Education. 
— Often in the history of this world 
have people failed in the thing that 
they set out to do, and done a greater 
good which they never thought of. 
Men, for the sake of raising wages, 
are forming themselves into combina- 
tions — into clubs, and unions, and 
cooperative associations ; and, what- 
ever may be the industrial effect of 
these combinations, the social and 
moral effect is going to be very 
significant. One thing is certain, that 
the men who are cooperating in this 
way are learning self-denial. They 
are spending less money for personal 
indulgence. And every association 
where men work industriously, using 
only a part of their earnings to sup- 
port themselves, and giving the rest 
for the furtherance of a public end, 
although that end may not be as high 
as it might be, is a school. It is not 
a great military drill-ground ; but, 
better than that, it is a great social 
drill-ground. 

929. Hope for Organized Labor. — 
If labor is to fight capital by a rivalry 
in selfishness then society will be but 



a carcass lying between the vultures. 
Organized labor must be more manly, 
more robust in virtue, more patriotic, 
more public spirited, and more intel- 
ligent than organized capital, or it 
will go down in the conflict. It is this 
rising and extending sympathy be- 
tween men of different trades, and 
between the workingmen of different 
nations, that inspires oursympathy and 
our hope that labor may bring classes 
and nations into sympathy and coop- 
eration, which have hitherto been dis- 
cordant or oppugnant. 

930. Danger of Labor Unions. — 
There is a danger that these coopera- 
tive associations will set aside the 
great law of subordination. You can- 
not by legislation bring all men up 
to an equality. There are certain 
great laws which are as inevitable as 
fate. You can make all men equal 
to each other politically ; you can 
make all men equal before the law ; 
you can make all men equal in rights 
and duties ; but you cannot make all 
men equal in their earning-power. If 
you make the wages of a weak and 
ignorant man the same as the wages 
of a strong and wise man, you do that 
which is fundamentally unjust. If the 
indolent and the industrious are treated 
alike, the finest and the highest 
workers and the slovenliest and lowest 
workers are graded to the same price 
— there is taken away from them the 
fundamental motive by which man- 
hood is stirred up, and ingenuity 
quickened, and industry developed. 
It destroys individualism. It leads 
towards that consolidation of society 
in which the nation is everything and 
the individual citizen nothing. It is 
the Roman ideal of the State, that 
swallowed all the men. 

931. Labor Organizations. — The 
power of organization I need not ex- 
plain to you. It is a tremendous 



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power. Wisely made, wisely man- 
aged, wisely directed, it may be said 
that it gives the scepter to Labor. 
And it holds the scepter only because 
it has the vote. For the vote is the 
opening of the bottle of the fable, and 
the genie has gone out and swelled to 
incredible proportions, and never can 
be put back again. Men who have 
the vote have access to every element 
of power in society ; and if they under- 
stand themselves, and organize skill- 
fully and wisely, they will be strong. 

932. The Classes. — In communi- 
ties like our own, where classes are 
aggregated by certain elective affini- 
ties, the worst mischiefs ensue ; for, the 
world over, classes are apt to be arro- 
gant and over-conceited. Beware, 
then, of classes. Join them just as a 
man joins a wood, on his way through 
it for shelter or for pleasure. Go into 
them, but go through them. Use 
them, but never let them use you. 
Be larger than any class will ever let 
its members be. Stand high, and re- 
member that manhood is better than 
any of the sections into which it is 
broken up. 

933. Democratic Self-Government. 
— Here walks out of his university, 
with cap and gown and velvet shoe, 
the man who has touched the highest 
point of education in Europe, and who 
says, " What a vulgar business they are 
making of governing over there in 
America ! They have not the first 
idea of government." We are not 
teaching two thousand how to govern 
in the Church nor ten thousand how 
to govern in the State : we are teach- 
ing fifty million people how to govern 
themselves, and how to manage the 
economies of this nation ; and it is a 
great deal better that, on the way to a 
wiser governing of this nation, fifty 
million should govern it rudely and 
imperfectly, than that two thousand 



or ten thousand should do it better, 
and leave all the rest of the whole fifty 
million utterly ignorant of the process 
of government. 

934. The Top and the Bottom of 
Society. — I cast into the ground the 
seed of the magnolia ; the plant 
spreads and sends down its root, go- 
ing deeper and deeper, the root min- 
istering to the gradually rising stem. 
But when it has grown to be a great 
tree, and spreads its broad, green 
leaves to the air, and when it is cov- 
ered with its magnificent vases full of 
perfume, the topmost bloom will never 
forget for one single instant that hum- 
ble root which, plunged away down 
out of sight, is giving it its nourish- 
ment ; and if you cut the connection 
between the top and the root, the top 
perishes, and the root likewise. So it 
is to be among men, 

935. The Commune of 1871. — The 
contrast between the gayety of Paris 
and this sullen under-class that has 
been educating itself and watching 
from beneath, forces itself upon every 
imaginative mind. While the upper- 
class sung and danced, and wearied 
the hours burdened with pleasure, 
right beneath them, and mingled, it 
may be, with them, were these sullen- 
eyed men that had their purposes, and 
only waited for the time of their execu- 
tion. I have seen, in the thicket, 
birds flitting from branch to branch, 
while crouched beneath, waiting for 
an opportunity to pounce upon them, 
lay the cat. As they drew near, he 
gathered himself up for a spring ; and 
as they flew further away, he sank 
back into a state of repose ; but he 
still waited for a chance to secure his 
prey. And underneath all this gayety 
lay these men, like a tiger watching 
and crouching for his victim, waiting 
to spring upon the pleasure-seekers of 
Paris. 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



203 



936. The Lower Orders. — It is 
pretty generally the custom in New 
England, where the winters are long, 
to have a great store of potatoes, cab- 
bages, onions, and all manner of 
vegetables, and the old-fashioned way 
was as soon as the climate became too 
severe for them to be left out in the 
open air, to put them in the cellars, 
which are built with thick walls and 
where they will not freeze ; and when 
the spring begins to come on and the 
remnant of the vegetables begins to 
reek and germinate malarial influ- 
ences, those silent, vaporous influences 
steal up through crack and cranny 
and partition. By and by one of the 
children is sick ; the doctor is sent for. 
He says: "It is singular that the 
child should have such a trouble as 
this ; if you lived in a squalid neigh- 
borhood I could understand it, but 
this looks very much as if it were ma- 
larial disease." The child dies. By 
and by a second child is taken sick, 
and the wonder grows ; and the 
mother goes down ; and by this time 
they send for the minister, and he 
looks grave. " Mysterious provi- 
dence! " he says. But it is not provi- 
dence at all ; it is rotten onions and 
potatoes downstairs. And the upper 
classes in society have a great deal 
more risk than they are apt to sup- 
pose ; though they keep themselves in 
a sanative condition, yet there is this 
reeking influence that is coming up 
directly or indirectly from society 
everywhere. 

937. Varying Standards in Life. — 
A man that at the bottom of society 
would be considered fit to stand as the 
highest, at the top would not be con- 
sidered fit to stand as the lowest. On 
shipboard, where not one man in 
twenty can read and write, a man 
that can read and write and cipher is 
considered a great scholar. But sup- 



pose he should go to a college and 
ask to be one of its professors ? He is 
a learned man on shipboard, but a 
fool at a college door. And so, in 
human laws and customs there is no 
such thing as a standard which shall 
be applicable everywhere and under 
all circumstances, 

938. Uncharitable Verdicts. — There 
is a judgment seat set up in every 
man's heart; and silently as shadows 
move we bring one and another and 
another, man, woman and child, up 
before that judgment seat ; in our 
thoughts we canvass their characters, 
and accuse them, and allow bribed 
and biased witnesses to testify against 
them, and condemn them, giving them 
no opportunity whatsoever to explain 
or to defend themselves. Thus our 
own inner soul is a sort of judgment 
hall where the worst judgments are 
formed and registered, which we some- 
times carry through months and years, 
and on which we act. 

939. Social Judgments. — I am not 
afraid for my reputation. That is not 
worth much. God might issue an or- 
der to cut off my shadow to-morrow. 
I suppose I could get along without a 
shadow. I should never feel the loss. 
Let men that want to, go and hunt 
after the shadow, and take care of it. 

940. Discrimination of Qualities. — 
We take a fish, and before we eat it 
we scale it, and dress it, and keep 
that which is good, and throw away 
that which is bad ; and so we have to 
take our friends. He who does not 
know how to take them thus, but has 
to swallow them whole or throw them 
away entirely, is to be pitied. It is 
the mistakes that men make in this re- 
gard which lead to much of the poverty 
of life. 

941. Seeking Good, not Evil. — When 
doves fly in the heavens, and go 
swinging round in their flight, we 



•04 



SOCIAL LIFE 



know what they see — the grassy field, 
the luxuriant grain, or the inviting 
perch where they may rest ; but when 
buzzards fly through the air they see 
no green fields, no pleasant gardens, 
but carrion, if there be any in sight; 
and if there is none to be seen, there is 
discontent in the buzzard heart. Be a 
dove, and not a buzzard ; and seek not 
the things that are painful and disa- 
greeable, but, contrariwise, the things 
that are wholesome and sweet. 

942. Hate Evil Deeds, not Evil- 
Doers. — Can you help hating a man 
who is so wicked that it seems as 
though he were clothed in wickedness ? 
Yes, yes ! I do not suppose that there 
is anybody so wicked as the man that 
hates you, and persecutes you, and 
follows you up spitefully, and has a 
mean, sneaking, venomous hatred that 
oozes out of him all the time ; I do not 
think there is any toad or any horned 
snake that seems so repugnant and 
repulsive to a man's natural feeling as 
such a man ; and yet Christ says : 
" Pray for him ; love him ; do good to 
him ; be patient with him." That set- 
tles the controversy whether a man 
can separate another man that does 
evil from the evil which he does. 

943. Power of the Tongue. — The 
tongue is the expression of our inward 
states of mind, and so, its reach is im- 
mense. It can rise to the very highest 
themes of spirituality, and all experi- 
ences therein. It can be the minister 
of love. It can be an instructor 
through imagination. It can give 
knowledge. It can give encourage- 
ment, cheer, consolation. It can bind 
up wounds. It can salve them and 
soothe them. Or, it may be the in- 
strument of wrath, ignoble appetites 
and passions. For the mischief that 
it can do, for the malignity that it can 
express, it has no rival. For the 
transcendent beauty which it may ex- 



hibit, for the comfort and knowledge 
which it may minister, it also has no 
rival. The pen works for a longer 
period, but the pen is dry. The tongue 
is a living force. It adds to the mere 
enunciation of any theme or feeling 
that electric impulse which every man 
carries with him. The pen has no 
blood ; the tongue has much. We do 
well to take heed of it. 

944. Slander. — Society is full of 
cruelty. Dore's hideous pictures from 
Dante in which men are represented 
as gnawing skull bones in the infernal 
regions ; in which men are represented 
as feeding off from their victims — 
these are enough to shock us, and 
drive us from all pictorial illustrations 
of that kind ; but, after all, we see 
these things in life. There is canni- 
balism around about us all the time 
and everywhere. Not a bird's leg is 
taken up and counted a more delicious 
morsel, and is more deliberately picked 
and chewed and relished in all its 
juices, than a person's reputation is 
taken up, and cut, and bitten, and 
sucked dry, and cast out. It is wicked ; 
it is damnable ; it is treason to man 
and treason to God ; and yet such 
things are common. 

945. Lack of Sympathy is Infidelity. 
— There is no disposition which strikes 
at the very root of Christianity like 
unlovingness and severity of judgment. 
When Christ was on earth he said — 
" The publicans and harlots shall enter 
into the kingdom of heaven before 
you." Before whom? Men that 
wrapped themselves in morality and 
in certain virtues, only that they might 
discharge themselves of all sympathy 
with the rude and the vulgar and the 
sinful . To be empty of that sympathy 
is to be infidel to the heart of Jesus. 
No man would dare go into his neigh- 
bor's house to defile the cradle. No 
man would suffer himself to be caught 



SOCIAL RELATIONS 



205 



beating the child of a dear friend ; 
and is God less sensitive ? When you 
are sending out arrowy sentences and 
poisoned words, when you are cre- 
ating suffering here and there and 
everywhere without any moral aim in 
it, and without any restorative tend- 
ency to it, when you are doing it 
merely in the exercise of your animal 
and inferior nature, does not God take 
the side of those whom you are wrong- 
ing ? Beware ! 

946. The Harm of Profanity. — Men 
ask, " What is the harm of profanity ? 
When a man says ' Damn ! ' he does 
not mean damn. When a man says 
'Curse it!' of course he does not 
mean curse it. He does not really 
mean anything bad." Is there no 
harm in a man's pursuing a course 
which steadily wears out moral senti- 
ment? Is there no harm in indulging 
in expressions with regard to things 
sacred that are like rasps, wearing 
down the surface and taking off the 
very skin ? There is harm in all the 
various modes of destroying sentiment 
and the root of veneration and rever- 
ence. 

947. Compliments. — A compliment 
is praise crystallized. It bears about 
the relation to praise that proverbs do 
to formal philosophy. 

948. Raillery There is an inno- 
cent and even pleasure-producing 
method of rallying which, if deftly and 
gracefully done, heightens the enjoy- 
ment of society. One may touch a 
discord if it lapses into a true chord. 
Sometimes, when we have good news 
to tell, we are bewitched with a desire 
to open the matter as if it were a great 
trouble that we were about to break. 
There is a gentle badinage, an inno- 
cent arrow-shooting, which flatters and 
charms. But life is full of the other 
sort. If Darwin is right in thinking 
that men ascended from monads by 



gradual evolution, then it is very 
certain that some men came up by the 
way of the mosquito, the flea and the 
biting fly, and that their ancestral 
traits still hnger in the blood, 

949. To Cure Malign Feelings. — If 
you want to cure one malign feeling, 
recollect that our feelings act, as it 
were, in poles ; that there is an an- 
tagonistic feehng. If a child cries, 
the nurse, who is a better philosopher 
than many wiser heads, makes up 
faces, makes herself grotesque ; the 
child struggles against it for a while, 
but finally bursts out laughing, and 
that moment the crying and the anger 
are all gone. Two opposite feelings 
cannot coexist. If anger is up, good- 
nature is down. If you want to get 
anger down, don't try to push it down, 
— that won't do ; but go to the other 
end and pry up good-nature. 

950. Evil Overcome with Good. — 
As when children sit balanced on the 
ends of a long plank if one goes down 
the other goes up, so it is with the 
faculties. If anger is up, inspire good- 
nature by some unexpected motive, 
and, as it opens, down will go ill- 
nature. If it is cruelty, in some way 
bring to bear a pressure on benevo- 
lence, and as that comes into activity, 
down will go the opposite feeling. If 
it is moroseness and sullenness, let fly 
the flash of mirth, and the moment the 
mind catches the inspiration those 
other feelings will drop. As the first 
star of the morning drives away the 
darkness of night, so the light of the 
higher feehngs drives back to their 
appropriate den these lower ones. 

951 . Truth in Anger. — Never forget 
what a man has said to you when he 
was angry. If he has charged you 
with anything, you had better look it 
up. Anger is a bow that will shoot 
sometimes where another feeling will 
not. 



2o6 



SOCIAL LIFE 



XX. CIVIC INTERESTS 



952. The Use of a Rule A princi- 
ple is better than a rule ; yet we are 
not to despise rules, for they are lead- 
ing-strings intended to bring us along 
the path of life to principles. A rule 
is like a mould. You pour in the 
wax ; and when it is pressed, it comes 
out, and the mould is left behind. 
The end of a rule is to bring the man 
out from the rule. 

953. Rules Teach Principles. — Rules 
are of the nature of mechanical ar- 
rangements that are dependent upon 
facts, times, and seasons ; and they 
are designed to help the physical side 
of the human mind. They are to 
men what walking-chairs are to babies, 
designed, not to take the place of their 
legs, but to teach them how to use 
their legs, and which they will shove 
aside as soon as they have learned the 
use of their legs. And as long as in- 
dividual men or societies of men 
need, and cannot get along without, 
rules and specifications, which say 
that such particular things must be 
done on such particular days, and at 
such particular hours, so long they 
must have them ; but rules should al- 
ways lead to principles. 

954. Highest Liberty. — Men are 
free in proportion to the number of 
spheres of obedience that they can fill. 
Laws are not shackles to impede, but 
tools and harnesses to assist human 
force. The peculiarity of our early 
ancestry was not that they loved lib- 
erty — everything in heaven, on earth, 
and in the sea does that ; but they 
discerned the royal fact, which others 
had missed who threw off law to find 
liberty, that by taking on law men are 
made free. Obedience to God's law is 
the highest liberty to which humanity 
may ever reach. 



955. Liberty the Aim of Law. — I 
never would steal, even if there were 
no laws against it. You might unlock 
your safe, and throw your keys into 
the sea, and I would not take your 
money. I refrain from stealing, not 
because I am afraid of jails, but be- 
cause I am an honest man. It would 
hurt me more than it would you, if I 
were to steal your money. I am not 
tempted at all in that direction. 
Therefore the command, "Thou shalt 
not steal," has no application to me, 
— thanks to my father, and to his 
father, and to his father, and to his 
father, through a line of honest men. 
Therefore I am relieved from bondage 
to that law : I fulfill it without a sense 
of obligation, from my own free 
choice. 

956. Civil Governments. — God did 
not create man, and then command a 
government over him, but he created 
man with a necessity and instinct of 
government, and then left that instinct 
and necessity to develop themselves. 
God made men to need clothes, but he 
never cut out a pattern for them to 
make their clothes by. He left them 
to choose their own raiment. 

Governments are not accidental. 
Governments are always the legitimate 
outworkings of the condition of those 
governed ; and there cannot, for any 
prolonged period, be a government 
that is not, in the nature of things, 
adapted to those under it. . . . Gov- 
ernments are shadows that nations 
and peoples themselves cast ; and they 
usually measure in some degree the 
proportions of the peoples or nations 
that cast them. 

957. Governments Fit Peoples. — If 
you look at certain flowers, you will 
find that there is a hood that covers 



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207 



the bud. It is a capital thing as long 
as the bud does not want to blossom ; 
but as soon as the blossom is ready to 
come out, this hood slips up, and slips 
up, and slips up, till at last it stands 
upon the leaves like an extinguisher 
on a candle, and the wind hurls it 
down. But why did it slide off ? Be- 
cause the blossom got to be so big that 
it could not stay on. 

Now, where a government laps a 
people in their crude state, if you take 
the people and make them swell and 
grow, as they grow they will lift up the 
government, and as they become big- 
ger, the government will become 
smaller, till by and by it is only a little 
cap which a puff of wind blows over, 
A government should be reformed by 
reforming its people. 

958. Ignorance Invites Tyranny. — 
Just as far as ignorance and passion 
and rudeness exist in a community, 
they impede self-government, or even 
make it impossible. And where the 
people are not prepared or qualified to 
govern themselves, absolute govern- 
ments are just as certain now as ever. 
For as ignorance disappears, so dis- 
appear monarchies ; and as ignorance 
comes back, so inevitably come back 
monarchies. August laughs at the 
idea of March, and says, " We have 
no frost ; we have warm nights and 
glowing days, and there shall be no 
more frosts." But there is a January 
to every August, as there is an April 
to every January. And there are just 
such revolutions in the history of the 
world. You can have Pharaohs again, 
if you want them, — though I pray God 
that there may be a Red .Sea for every 
one of them ! You can have dynasties 
again through just letting the people 
become adapted to them by igno- 
rance, by unvirtue, by a want of self- 
restraint, by pampered self-indul- 
gence, or by pride growing out of 



monstrous prosperity. Every step to- 
wards declension from moral character 
is a written invitation for tyranny to 
come back, — and it never lingers long 
nor hesitates when invited. 

959. Free Communities, Good Cus- 
tomers. — Blessed is that nation which 
has to supply the wants of a civilized 
people ; they are great consumers. It 
is supposed that the natural state of a 
man is simplicity. No, it is complexity. 
The natural state of a man is like that of 
a tree. And what is the nature of an 
oak, but to divide and subdivide, and 
spread out infinite branches on every 
side ? The first state of a man, hke 
the first state of a tree, may be sim- 
plicity, and he may be, as it were, a 
single whip ; but as he begins to grow 
he will throw out branches, and these 
branches will throw out other 
branches, and those will throw out 
others, and he will take in more by 
root and leaf. Every interest that 
makes money and intelligence pleads 
for a policy of liberty. 

960. Liberty is Safe. — A /?///? liberty 
in men may be dangerous. Then 
give them more. It is said that a little 
learning is dangerous. Yes, a little 
learning is ; but a little intelligence is 
not. There is a great difference be- 
tween intelligence and learning. A 
little intelligence is safe ; a httle more 
is safer yet ; a little more is still safer ; 
and the more a man has of it the 
better he is. For intelligence does 
not consist in the facts that a man 
knows ; it consists in the power of 
knowing. And so it is in respect to 
liberty. Liberty is meant for man ; 
and man is meant for liberty ; and 
the more you can make a man under- 
stand of the law of God that is in him, 
the more you can drive him up to a 
full obedience to, and use of, the law 
that is written in himself, the more 
safe he will be. 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



961. Civil Institutions, Human De- 
fences. — The growth of ages, amidst 
the clangor of war and the upsetting 
of men and the waste of dynasties, 
has been in the direction of hmiting 
power. The history of institutions is 
simply that. Institutions are the bul- 
warks within which the rights of man 
and facilities for the development of 
intelligence and power are concen- 
tered. They are, it might be said, 
fortifications against wanton caprice 
and lawless selfishness. 

962. Liberty, Intelligence and Re- 
ligion. — If we give liberty to the whole 
people ; if we educate them, and in- 
spire them with a true intelligence ; 
and if, above all, we crown their ma- 
terial acquisitions, and all that educa- 
tion gives them, with a sincere love 
for God and love for man, we shall 
have a people that is competent to 
grow, making wood such that the tree 
will be able to bear the beating upon 
it of the elements, and that the winter 
and summer storms which rock it shall 
make it elastic, but shall not break it. 

963. Growth of Colonial Liberty. — 
Liberty, like steam, without its appro- 
priate engines is but a vapor. As a 
disembodied principle, it wanders up 
and down the earth, seeking rest and 
finding none. It needs a body. In 
other days that body has been some- 
times a shapeless giant, or a dwarf, or 
some monster, form. In our Colonial 
times, it pleased God to give to it such 
a shapely body as suited its merit. 
The church, the state, the legislatures, 
the courts, the executive, the body of 
wise laws all revolving within well 
defined spheres — these were the prod- 
ucts of that long Colonial history, 
which, because it threw up no auroral 
glow upon the heavens, seems to 
many of little importance. 

964. Constitution of United States. 
— That after times had something to 



add and something to change does 
not take away from the grandeur of 
that great instrument our Constitution, 
which has for nearly one hundred 
years proved itself adequate to the 
conservation of liberty and of power. 
The perils through which it came to 
strength are largely hidden by the 
glow of its abundant prosperity. The 
foundation of the great piers of the 
Brooklyn suspension bridge, that stand 
over against each other, on our river, 
are forever hidden. Men see, and 
will see, only the majesty of the ac- 
complished work ; but few remember 
the darkness, the perils, the unmatched 
difficulties of the caisson in the be- 
ginning. 

965. Vital Force of Liberty. — A 
man takes a seed, and says, " You 
want to grow ; you shall not ; I will 
put you where you cannot ; " and he 
stamps it into the ground. It is gone ! 
There is not a thing to be seen of it ! 
But the rains will find it, and the sun 
will come and whisper hope to it, and 
the root will not ask permission to 
grow the downward way, and the 
stalk will take permission to grow the 
upward way, and that which was sup- 
posed to be stamped into its grave 
shall find itself alive, and shall mul- 
tiply a hundredfold. Now all the 
efforts that are being made to put 
back the cause of liberty will prove to 
be but so many means for hastening 
the day of its consummation. 

966. Spirit of Freedom Irresistible. 
— When they dug for the Dry Dock 
in the Navy Yard, they struck a cen- 
tral spring ; and the engineer said 
that it had better have some cement 
put on it to stop it up. They opened 
a hole and put in some cement ; but 
the next morning the cement was 
gone, and the spring was boiling 
again. Then the engineer said there 
had better be some solid masonry to 



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209 



shut down the spring. So they built 
it in carefully with masonry. The 
spring waited until they got home, 
and then burst out again. Then they 
determined to drive piles down, and 
fi.x it. They did drive piles, and 
fix it ; but the spring bubbled up 
again, just as if it did not care any- 
thing about engineers nor engineering. 
After they had spent some months in 
trying to stop the spring, they built a 
curb around it, and let it run. The 
fact was, that it had most of the east 
end of Long Island pushing it out, and 
no piles nor masonry nor cement could 
match the secret underground force 
by which it was impelled. So, in 
America, there was nothing that could 
resist the spirit of freedom which came 
down from Him who resides in the 
heavens. And when, through all this 
nation, by plannings, by plottings, by 
political masonry, by piles driven with 
fraud, by the cement of iniquity, by all 
manner of arrangements, men were 
attempting to defeat the spirit of Al- 
mighty God and maintain slavery. He 
broke through and scattered them. 
And now the stream of hberty runs 
freely and unobstructed. It is the 
river of the water of life. 

967. Unpopular Laws. — In Amer- 
ica, a law with no popular public 
sentiment behind it, or with no active 
good will behind it, is like a gun with 
no powder in it. Though it be a good 
gun, it is useless. 

968. Free Government Requires 
Self-Restraint. — The South American 
republics have for a great while elected 
presidents ; and what have they been ? 
Men of straw, if they were mere presi- 
dents ; and kings, every inch of them, 
if they have been good for anything. 
The reason of this has been that the 
people were not prepared for freedom. 
They had not developed the liberty of 
self-restraint in themselves. And, like 



eruptions that make earthquakes if 
they cannot get discharge, and that 
make volcanoes if they do get dis- 
charge, the South American republics 
have been a vast crater boiUng with 
revolutions. And so it will be there 
till education and true religion make 
more of manhood, and of self-restraint. 

969. Public Spirit and Preaching, — 
Public spirit, which is a form of be- 
neficence, was never stronger than it 
is to-day. It is growing more and 
more universal. And I judge of the 
preaching in a place by the public 
spirit which I see exhibited there. If 
I go through a village and see that the 
town-pump is in a dilapidated condi- 
tion, and the fences are tumbling 
down, and the town-house is a rat- 
tlety-bang affair, taken possession of 
more by winds and rains than by 
men, and that the churches are poor, 
and the almshouse is a miserable 
place, and the roads are stony, and 
that there are no bridges but rails 
with a few clods thrown on them, — I 
say, " There is poor doctrine preached 
in this village." No man can be 
preached to as he ought to be in re- 
gard to his duty to God and men, 
without his religion having a reflex 
influence in his house, his barn, the 
pubHc highways, everything that be- 
longs to him and his fellow-men. 

970. Leveling Tendency of the Gos- 
pel. — The tendency of the Gospel is 
leveling, — leveling not down but up. 
It is carrying the poor and the multi- 
tude onward and upward. It is said 
that democracies have few great men, 
few heroic men. Why is it so ? 
When you raise the average of intel- 
ligence and power in the community 
it is very hard to be a great man. 
That is to say, when the great mass 
of citizens are only ankle high, if 
among the Liliputians a Brobdignag- 
ian walks, he is a great man ; but 



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SOCIAL LIFE 



when the Lihputians grow, and grow, 
and grow, until they get up to his 
shoulder, he is not so great a man as 
he was. So, make the common people 
grow, and there is nobody tall enough 
to be much higher. 

971. True Democracy. — In our 
land, men have classified themselves. 
We have aristocrats, but God made 
them ; and there never will be a time 
when mightiness of soul shall not over- 
shadow littleness of soul. It was de- 
signed that some should be high, some 
intermediate, and some low, as trees 
are some forty, some a hundred, and 
some, the giant pines (how solitary 
their tops must be!) three hundred 
feet in height. But, however high 
their tops may reach, their roots rest 
in the same soil ; as men, though some 
may tower aloft, all stand on a com- 
mon level. 

972. Influence Higher than Au- 
thority. — As flowers blossom, become 
fragrant, and are followed by fruit, 
not so much by the direct exercise of 
power as by the solicitation of in- 
visible warmth and sweet influences, 
so there shall come a time when that 
which we now attempt to compass by 
coercive laws and penalties shall be 
educed and secured in a higher meas- 
ure, in larger spheres, more thoroughly 
and better, by simple influence. 

973. The Republic Demands Vir- 
tue. — Our institutions are the best if 
they are the best served ; but the 
poorest if poorly served. Repubhcan 
institutions demand energetic and vir- 
tuous citizens. Compared with oars, 
what great advantage has the steam 
engine ! But if for want of steam you 
attempt to work the engine by men's 
hands, it becomes far inferior to oars. 
Steam engines require steam. Su- 
perior institutions require superior 
motive power, or they are worse than 
the governments of primitive force. 



974. The Ballot. — When winter 
has for months held the earth in 
bondage, and the period comes for its 
emancipation, what is it that is sent to 
its rescue ? The driving lightning ; 
the resounding thunder ; the pelting 
storm ? No : the raindrops, soft and 
mellow, come plashing down. All 
through the night they fall, and fall, 
and fall ; and in the morning where is 
the snow? It is wasted and gone. 
The rivers are bound with icy fetters ; 
the rain falls, and falls, and falls ; and 
behold, the ice is rotten and sunk to 
the bottom, or is swept out to the sea, 
and the rivers are set free. The earth 
is brown and russet, and the rain still 
falls, and falls, and falls ; and myriads 
of roots wake up and send forth green 
banners ; and in every tree and bush 
and vine, on every hillside, through 
every valley, and in every field are 
signs and tokens of resurrection, A 
more wonderful power has there been 
in the silent plashing drops, falling 
still as dust, to bring out the greenness 
of resurrected spring than there would 
have been in myriads of the mightiest 
chariots if God had sent them. 

Silent falls the ballot, and away go 
shackles. Silent falls the ballot, and 
away go bondages. Still silent falls 
the ballot, and a whole continent is 
renewed, and Liberty stands dressed 
in her spring greenery. And on God's 
earth there is nothing more beauteous 
and sublime than the spectacle of a 
nation voting. 

975. Suffrage. — That bit of paper 
which is called a vote is not mere 
paper ; it is the symbol of a man's 
will. And what is the will of an as- 
sembled nation ? The king is a man 
sitting on a throne and giving laws to 
an empire ; but what is he compared 
with an empire sitting on a throne and 
giving laws to itself.'' The voice of 
thirty million men carries both music 



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211 



and thunder ; and nothing is so sub- 
lime on God's earth as the silent om- 
nipotence of the ballot. 

976. Separateness of the Jews. — 
As the mother keeps the children at 
home, sequesters them, lest they be 
injured by a neighborhood which is 
injurious to the welfare of children, and 
does not send them out until they have 
attained character and manhood, and 
then lets them go forth, so the divine 
economy in antiquity was to take this 
select people and bury them, as it were, 
in obscurity, and develop them until 
they should attain such moral stature 
that it should be safe for them to go out. 

977. Fanatical Patriotism of the 
Jews. — These words of Jesus were 
like flame upon stubble. The love of 
country among the Jews was a fanati- 
cism. It carried with it a burning 
hatred of foreigners, as heathen, 
which no prudence could restrain. 
Every year this ferocious spirit broke 
out, and was put down by the slaugh- 
ter of hundreds and thousands of 
Jews. It made no difference. Like 
the internal fires of the globe, it 
burned on, even when no eruption 
made it manifest. The historical facts 
alleged could not be gainsaid ; but 
the use of them to show that God 
cared for other nations, even at the 
expense of the Jews, produced a 
burst of uncontrollable fury. 

978. Patriotism: Concentrated, and 
Diffused. — We have had, in our day,* 
a magnificent opportunity to see what 
is the grandeur of this feeling in its 
primary state. For hours, and days, 
and weeks, it flamed out in our midst 
so that it was indeed like the pillar of 
fire by night, and the cloud by day, 
that showed the people which way to 
go through the wilderness. But it is 
gone, and neither you nor I can wake 
it again. No paper article, no ad- 

1 At the outbreak 



vance of armies, no votes of Con- 
gress, no orator's appeal, no preach- 
er's fervor, can again cause to burst 
forth the feeling of patriotism with 
that strength, and in that particular 
form which characterized it a short 
time since. But something better has 
taken its place. In its stead we have 
patriotism in its secondary state, in 
which it is diffusing itself, and labor- 
ing, and producing results. At first 
the feeling of patriotism was like a 
bonfire or beacon light, for alarm of 
dangers, or for guiding ; but now it is 
a diffused daylight spread throughout 
the hearts of millions of men, and 
manifesting itself in practical deeds. 
It was good at first ; now it is better. 

979, National Excitements. — I lived 
in Hartford once — blessed be the 
year — and saw the Connecticut River 
come down in a freshet, booming ; 
all the broad Hartford meadows were 
covered over, and you could not 
go in that direction but by boat or 
bridge ; and it looked as though the 
river had taken possession of the land, 
and was having its own way ; and 
after it had subsided all the meadows 
were covered with a nasty slime. But 
it was soil, it was manure, and the 
grass never grew so much as during 
the summer after the freshets. If the 
farmer's plow turned up the sod, the 
corn was never so rank as after a 
freshet had deposited the soil stolen 
from every inch of ground, north. 

So these freshets that come in na- 
tional affairs almost always leave a 
detritus that is enriching. Our times 
of quiet and peace are generally times 
of deterioration. Our times of excite- 
ment, discussion, anxiety and enter- 
prise are times of erosion and new de- 
posits, times of plowing, times of hoe- 
ing. It is a good tilling where there 
is excitement, 
of the Civil War. 



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980. The Nation and the States. — 
When the wholesome doctrine of 
States Rights reappeared in the 
South, it had in those warm latitudes 
undergone fermentation, and had 
passed into a new thing, viz. : States 
Sovereignty. There can never be 
more than one sovereignty in a polit- 
ical body. The Nation alone is 
Sovereign. It is, to be sure, a limited 
sovereignty. The metes and bounds 
have been fixed. All within them is 
Federal, all without belongs to the in- 
dividual States. Within their own 
spheres, however, the self-jurisdiction 
of the States is absolute. . . . The 
States are so many points of vitality. 
The nation, like a banyan tree, lets 
down a new root where each new 
State is established, and when cen- 
turies have spread this gigantic com- 
mercial tree over a vast space, it will 
be found that the branches most re- 
mote from the center do not draw 
their vitahty through the long intricate 
passages from the parent trunk, but 
each outlying growth has roots of its 
own, and draws straight from the 
ground by organisms of its own, all 
the food it wants, without dissociating 
its top from the parent branches ! 

The dignity and power of National 
Sovereignty will be secured by main- 
taining unimpaired the local Rights of 
the States. 

981. Approach of the Civil War. — 
Are men less sensitive than metal ? 
Shall barometers foretell whirlwinds, 
give alarm of tornadoes half a conti- 
nent distant, and yet shall a whole 
hemisphere of storms move in upon 
society, and no man feel the chill of 
the shadow which they cast forward ? 
Right before the nation were clouds 
dripping blood, and full of wasting 
fire. None saw. Right before them 
were heaped-up corpses, armies of 
the dead, suffering, fear, famine and 



pestilence, but men heeded them 
not! 

Neither, any more, did they see the 
new heavens and the new earth that 
followed the convulsions of the old, a 
nobler liberty, a purer justice, better 
friendship, more lasting brotherhood ! 

982. Effect of Lincoln's Death. — 
The blow, however, has signally 
failed. The cause is not stricken ; it 
is strengthened. This nation has dis- 
solved — but in tears only. It stands, 
four-square, more solid, to-day, than 
any pyramid in Egypt. This people 
are neither wasted, nor daunted, nor 
disordered. Men hate slavery and 
love liberty with stronger hate and 
love to-day than ever before. 

983. An Earthly Immortal. — Abra- 
ham Lincoln — a name spoken in 
every corner of Christendom and 
added to the roll of those upon whom 
Time has no power. 

984. Disbandingof American Armies. 
— First, after the end of our Civil War, 
came the disbanding of the army. 
That was so easily done that the world 
has never done justice to the marvel. 
The soldiers of three great armies 
dropped their arms at the word of 
command, dissolved their organiza- 
tions, and disappeared. To-day the 
mightiest force on earth ; to-morrow 
they were not ! As a summer storm 
darkens the whole heavens, shakes 
the ground with its thunder, empties 
its quiver of lightning, and is gone in 
an hour, as if it had never been, so 
was it with both armies. Neither in 
the South nor in the North was there 
a cabal of officers, nor any affray of 
soldiers — for every soldier was yet 
more a citizen. 

985. The Stars and Stripes. — The 
American flag has been a symbol of 
Liberty, and men rejoiced in it. Not 
another flag on the globe had such an 
errand, or went forth upon the sea 



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213 



carrying everywhere, the world 
around, such hope to the captive, and 
such glorious tidings. The stars upon 
it were to the pining nations hke the 
bright morning stars of God, and the 
stripes upon it were beams of morning 
hght. As at early dawn the stars 
shine forth even while it grows light, 
and then as the sun advances that 
light breaks into banks and streaming 
lines of color, the glowing red and 
intense white striving together, and 
ribbing the horizon with bars efful- 
gent, so, on the American flag, stars 
and beams of many-colored light 
shine out together. And wherever 
this flag comes, and men behold it, 
they see in its sacred emblazonry no 
ramping lion, and no fierce eagle ; no 
embattled castles, or insignia of im- 
perial authority ; they see the symbols 
of light. It is the banner of Dawn. 
It means Liberty ; and the galley- 
slave, the poor, oppressed conscript, 
the trodden-down creature of foreign 
despotism, sees in the American flag 
that very promise and prediction of 
God, — "The people which sat in 
darkness saw a great light ; and to 
them which sat in the region and 
shadow of death light is sprung 
up.'" 

986. National Ailments. — No na- 
tion ever existed that did not run 
through series and cycles of moral 
diseases. Sometimes it is the disease 
of war. In lower states both civil and 
foreign war are apt to break out. 
Then we pass away from that, and 
there come terms of riotousness and 
turbulence. Nations pass through 
these as children pass through the 
measles, the chicken-pox, and the 
whooping-cough. Then will come a 
period of luxurious corruption, ex- 
travagance, and unbounded expendi- 
ture. It swells and swells for a time, 
it increases like a fever, rising in spite 



of all resistance, and comes to its 
maximum ; and then it breaks, and 
passes off, and a better state of things 
comes in. Nations have spasms of 
avarice ; and under its baleful in- 
fluence the most outrageous proceed- 
ings come to be tolerated, and make 
headway. But a nation that has a 
substantial moral constitution is able 
to bear these things. 

987. Liabilities of High Civilization, 
— A community that lives on a low 
plane of civilization is like a canal. 
It is useful, but homely. There is 
nothing romantic about it. It is very 
safe, and has no dangerous storms or 
freshets. Active communities that 
live on a high plane of civilization are 
under a great stress, like rivers ; they 
are useful and grand, but are subject 
to wasting freshets which rise in their 
wrath, and overflow the banks, and 
subside again. And I think that rivers 
are better than canals, though canals 
are a little safer. Hence we are not to 
be surprised that in Christian com- 
munities there are developments of an 
alarming kind. 

988. Military Americans in Civil 
Office. — Our first President and our 
last were elected from the fields of 
war. Washington, though a man of 
war, is less thought of to-day in this 
nation as the commander of our 
armies than as the man who taught us 
peace. And Grant, who by his skill 
and indomitable courage wrought for 
us final deliverance, sat in the Presi- 
dential chair, not without some mis- 
takes — for he was human — but without 
one single tendency to military rule, 
and with as absolute respect for civil 
law as has been manifested by any 
President from the time of Washington 
down to this day. 

As I recede, along the adjoining 
fields of Jersey, from the great city, I 
speedily lose sight of the masts, of the 



214 



SOCIAL LIFE 



warehouses, and of the spires them- 
selves ; and yet when I have gone so 
far that the last glimmer of these 
things is lost, the towers of the Brook- 
lyn Bridge stand full and high in the 
air, conspicuous. As time goes on we 
shall forget that which called down 
such a storm of fury upon the name of 
Grant ; and when all incidental and 
collateral things have gone below the 
horizon, his name and just fame will 
stand towering high in the air, unob- 
scurcd and imperishable ! 

989. American Political Elasticity. 
— Nothing is more justly dreaded in 
Europe than a disputed succession to 
the throne. . . . But there have been 
fifteen Presidents within a hundred 
years in these United States ; there 
have been twenty-two elections here 
during the same period ; the question 
of succession has been debated with 
fiery zeal before this great people, and 
settled without sword or bayonet, 
twenty-two times [in 1876], and I am 
not afraid to put alongside of the ex- 
perience of Europe this record of a 
free people under free institutions. 
This is a thoroughbred nation ; and 
the place where other horses break 
down is the place where the thorough- 
bred horse comes out victorious — the 
point where the strain comes. 

990. America's Prosperity and Peril. 
— We are growing ; and it is not a 
matter merely for pride, it certainly is 
a matter of congratulation and boast- 
ing, that we are becoming so strong in 
riches, and so vast in territory, and so 
mighty in population. But there are 
dangers which come with these incre- 
ments. VVe must keep open, there- 
fore, every channel of intelligence. 
An ignorant man is a dangerous man. 
It is in the dark, or unswept, or un- 
washed places that vermin breed. 
Where the broom and the sun come, 
there come not vermin. 



991. Young Men in Public Life. — 
Those that go into public life to trans- 
act public business must go where 
their errands carry them, meet whom 
they may. The callow, the inex- 
perienced, the unfledged, must make 
their way among veteran experts. To 
be sure, it may be the making of 
many, and is ; but how many others 
are utterly spoiled in the making ? 
Back of every pottery-shop you shall 
find heaps and pyramids of potsherds. 
The vessels that go forth fair and 
comely from the front door say noth- 
ing of the fragments left behind that 
are disgraced and cast away as use- 
less. 

992. Public Life Dulls the Moral 
Sense. — In a worldly life, a loss of 
moral sensibility steals imperceptibly 
upon men. We lose that sensibility 
very much as we go to sleep. All day 
we are conscious of acute nervous 
feeling ; but use dulls the faculties, and 
as the sun goes towards the west we 
are conscious that that feehng is less 
and less keen ; and as evening comes 
on we grow pensive and sad, thus tak- 
ing a step towards somnolency ; and 
at last things about us cease to attract 
our attention, all our powers begin to 
retire within us, and little by little we 
fall away towards sleep, and into 
sleep. So it is with the moral sensi- 
bility of men in the world. One of the 
first things that strike men on going 
from private life into public afHiirs is 
the habit of looking at things, not 
from great moral standards, not from 
principles of truth and honor and jus- 
tice, but from selfish considerations or 
conventional reasons. At first it im- 
presses with a feeling of regret and 
pain, but little by little they become 
wonted to it. They cultivate the sec- 
ular side of the mind. It grows with 
culture. In time, right and wrong, on 
high grounds, come to seem specula- 



CIVIC INTERESTS 



215 



tive, impracticable. Conscience, un- 
used, slumbers — moves not — dies. 

993. Low Standards in Public Af- 
fairs. — In scholarship, in the practice 
of medicine or law, in any worldly 
sphere, to adopt a second-rate or third- 
rate way of doing things when you 
have before your mind the best way, 
is always demoralizing. And how 
much more is it so when we are judg- 
ing of moral qualities ! What is the 
condition of that man who gradually 
lowers his standard till it ceases alto- 
gether to be a moral guide, whose 
conscience is like a clock that beats 
strong and loud when first wound up, 
but that, as the weight sinks in the 
barrel, and the pendulum moves 
slower and slower, and ticks with less 
and less resonance, at last ceases to 
beat ? There are hundreds of men in 
public life whose consciences run 
down in this way, only they do not 
wear a dial-plate to show where they 
stopped. 

994. Faulty Instruments of Provi- 
dence. — We need not go back so far 
as antiquity or even the Middle Ages 
for an example of one man's cheating 
another out of his birthright, because 
he has the power. That is not a thing 
simply of the past. I should like to 
know what right England has in 
India, except the right which comes 
from her power to cheat that nation 
out of its hereditary possessions ? I 
should like to know what right there 
was in the confederated nations of 
Europe to divide and distribute Po- 
land, except the right of superior 
force ? It is a gigantic game of Jacob 
over again. I should like to know 
what right this government of the 
United States has to dispose of the 
Indians and of their territory, making 
treaty after treaty, violating one almost 
before another is formed, starving 
them and cheating them by un- 



scrupulous agents, and pursuing them 
with an army whose officers blush, 
and say at every step, "The Indians 
are right and we are wrong"? I 
think our age is not so far advanced 
that we can afford to be severe on 
Jacob. . . , But do you say, " Jacob, 
notwithstanding, was accepted for a 
great, providential work"? Yes, he 
was, in spite of this — not in con- 
sequence of it ; just as England and 
America are to-day. Providence must 
work with the materials it has. If it 
worked only with perfect men it would 
never work at all. 

995. Immigration. — As the Nile, in 
its great annual rise, brings down some- 
thing of the soil of every formation 
through a thousand miles, and deposits 
it as slime for the sun to turn to soil 
and fruitfulness, so upon these United 
States, with annual deposit, comes the 
emigrating freshet of the world. It 
falls upon us like mud ; it shall be our 
richest soil. When it is aerated, and 
when intelligence and I'eligion and 
liberty shall have penetrated it, it will 
be most precious. Its trouble is all 
now, and at the first. Its bounty and 
reward shall go on with increasing 
abundance to the very end. Can 
this nation survive, however, the chill 
and fever of malarial influence en- 
gendered by this new soil, until by 
culture the vast mass of new deposit 
shall, by the sun, the air and the plow 
become sweetened, and as wholesome 
for men as it is fertile for grain ? 

996. Communism and Anarchism.— 
We open our ports to foreign wares, 
and recognize foreign skill, and our 
libraries drink in foreign learning ; we 
recognize gratefully foreign scholar- 
ship ; our houses shine with the 
products of the atelier and of the 
loom, and we are grateful for foreign 
arts ; we take swarms and almost 
nations of foreign population, and 



2l6 



SOCIAL LIFE 



spread them upon our land, and arc 
thankful for the immigrant and for his 
labor. But when Europe sends to us 
the philosophers of the gutter to teach 
us how to make constitutions and 
commonwealths, we say, with respect 
and contempt, " We have nothing to 
learn of Europe on that side." 

997. Iconoclasm of the Paris Com- 
munists. — Who ever, driving the cows 
a-field, barefooted, and making haste, 
and striking his foot against a stone, 
has not, while suffering from the 
stinging pain caused by the blow, 
beaten the stone, that was not at 
fault, because it hurt him? And 
when men, running against the stone 
bulwarks of churches and cathedrals, 
out of which have come sharp pangs 
and pains, and against palaces, which, 
to them, have no poetic associations, 
and out of which have come their op- 
pressors, and that are looked upon as 
horrid and hideous places which have 
been the dens of those oppressors — 
as unclean places where devouring 
broods of despots have swallowed up 
their liberties — I do not wonder that 
there should be the feeling, " Put the 
torch to everything that tends towards 
the old tyranny ! " It does not justify 
them, but it explains how their fanati- 
cism has turned them against their 
own fair city. 

998. Social Unrest in Europe. — The 
working people of the manufacturing 
cities in all France are substantially in 
sympathy with the Communists of 
Paris. This is not, therefore, a boil 
breaking out in one place. It is a puff 
from a volcano ; and all around the 
mountain there are crevices through 
which the same sulphurous odor is 
emitted, showing that the whole moun- 
tain stands upon liquid fire. Without 
a doubt, there is a leaven among the 
workingmen of Europe of the same 
kind. Difference of race-stock, and 



difference of education, will make 
material modifications ; and I appre- 
hend that there never can be Com- 
munism in Germany as it exists in 
France. I do not believe that the 
Germanic stock can be run away with 
as the old Romanic stock can. But it 
is proper to say that there is a leaven 
of this theory, and that unless kindly 
influences are brought to bear upon it, 
all Europe will, sooner or later, be in 
alliance with such ideas. 

999. Public Amusements. — In 
America, so free have we been, so 
large an outlet has been given to our 
religious liberty, so large has been the 
expression of every poHtical want, so 
free has industry been and so re- 
munerative, that our people have not 
felt the need of amusements. These 
have seemed like moths to our in- 
dustry. We have found rest and ex- 
hilaration in other things. And to- 
day we urge amusements upon our 
people chiefly on moral and esthetic 
and not at all upon political grounds. 

But in Europe political hberty is 
mostly unknown, and religious hberty 
is a pinched dwarf. A crowded 
population have but slender hopes of 
wealth from industry. Human nature 
would explode if there were not some 
vent given. So Governments fostered 
popular amusements. In these, al- 
most only, the common people of 
Europe found themselves at liberty to 
do what they pleased. Amusements 
are the safety-valves of Europe. 

1000. Immigration and Freedom of 
Amusements. — A European people 
who have had the chief happiness of 
their lives clustering about amuse- 
ments, come to an American land 
where exceeding freedom has left 
almost no place for such things. We 
have liberty in association with poli- 
tics, with religion, and with business; 
they with amusements only. With 



CIVIC INTERESTS 



217 



the German on the one side, and with 
the Yankee on the other, is the same 
instrument of liberty, and for the most 
part it plays the same tunes; but that 
instrument in the hand of the Yankee 
is set four notes higher than it is in 
Europe. It plays business and com- 
merce, and government and religion, 
here. There it plays amusements. 
Liberty discords with liberty, because 
the instruments are not set to the same 
key. And when immigration brings 
all the pipers together, it is not sur- 
prising that the music clashes. It is 
next in mellifluous strains to the bag- 
pipe ; and that is the instrument that 
was made to express what was left of 
sound after other instruments had 
used up all smoothness and harmony. 

1 00 1. Converting the Chinese. — 
"Ah, but!" men say, "we do not 
want the heathen on our shores. 
They may have some little trick of 
work ; but then, they are heathen, 
and we do not want them here. They 
won't be converted. You never can 
mingle them with our own popula- 
tion." Wjcll, I am astonished at 
these Chinese myself! They have 
seen so many beautiful exhibitions of 
Christian character, that they must be 
very stupid not to admire it ! It must 
be that they are bereft of natural 
reason, not to be fascinated with 
California piety, and not to fall in 
love with the religion of the emigrants 
from the East ! Why, what have we 
not done to convert them ? We have 
thrashed them, and kicked them ; 
we have hung them on trees ; almost 
every Gospel influence has been 
brought to bear upon them ; but the 
fellows will not be converted ! Well, 
it may be that some nations are out- 
side of mercy ! 

Oh! what a mockery of our 
democratic notions, what a mockery 
of our own government, what a 



supreme mockery of the faith which 
we have in Jesus Christ, is the manner 
in which we are treating the poorer 
and weaker races among us ! 

1002. Modern American Perils. — 
There never was a time in the history 
of the world when there were more 
temptations to selfishness than now. 
We have overcome, in an awful 
struggle, temptations to arrogance 
and domination, but, right in the 
place of that terrific demon, stands 
now, looming up and gathering form, 
the figure of Mammon, threatening to 
be even more dangerous than Des- 
potism was. And no man is called to 
the Christian life who is not likewise 
to see to it that this nation, and the 
several governments of the States, 
and all the departments of human so- 
ciety, are defended and rescued from 
this terrific invasion. 

1003. Preaching on Secular Affairs. 
— I stand and say, " There are certain 
courses in the great commercial world 
that are sure to bring damage to those 
that pursue them." And you shall 
not revile me, saying, '• You are noth- 
ing but a minister. You are a lands- 
man. You know nothing about sail- 
ing." There are certain courses in 
banking that I know to be atrocious. 
I know that there are operations in 
railway management that outrage 
every law of prudence. And when 
this accumulation of peril begins to 
globe up and fill the very horizon, I 
know it is my business to sound the 
alarm. 

And when it is said, " Nobody can 
give advice in regard to the affairs of 
any given department unless he be- 
longs to those affairs," I say that a 
cock does not need to be in bed with 
you to know that the morning has 
come, and crow ! It is because he is 
out of doors, and sits aloft, and sees 
where the sun is coming up, that he 



2l8 



SOCIAL LIFE 



becomes the clarion of the morning, 
and gives you the signal for waking up. 

1004. A Legally Debased Currency. 
— There is a clanger from suppressed 
repudiation. When children have 
the measles, and when after an ap- 
propriate time saffron and all the 
other drinks fail to bring them out, 
the doctors shake their heads afnd call 
them sufpresied measles ; and the 
measles suppressed are more danger- 
ous than when brought out. So sup- 
pressed repudiation is more dangerous 
than any open and avowed repudia- 
tion. Whenever, in any nation, there 
is such an attempt to tamper with 
standards that the moral sense of men 
is bewildered, and liberty is given to 
unprincipled men at large to cheat, to 
be unfaithful to obligations, to refuse 
the payment of honest debts — wher- 
ever that takes place, it is all the 
worse if done with the permission of 
law ! I hate the devil riding on a law 
worse than I do the devil riding with- 
out a law under him. Whoever 
tampers with established standards 
tampers with the very marrow and 
vitality of public faith. 

1005. Paper Money. — How pitiable 
is the plea, that if greenbacks were 
good enough for war they are good 
enough for peace ! That if they 
bought munitions, paid debts, pur- 
chased lands, cleared farms, built 
railroads, and carried the business of 
a continent through a continued and 
desperate peril, they are good enough 
now. Is it true, then, that the 
medicine that carries a man through 
his sickness is good enough for food 
after he gets well ? Shall a man walk 
on crutches all his days because they 
helped him while lame ? A debased 
or enfeebled currency may be the 
desperate necessity of war, but it is 
the infatuation of ignorance, or an 
insanity of dishonesty, to pour out in- 



convertible paper in peace, or to at- 
tempt to make short-legged silver 
keep step with gold ! 

1006. National Honesty. — An in- 
sidious serpent is more dangerous than 
a roaring lion — if the lion does not 
jump before he roars. Repudiation 
threatened more damnation to the 
morals of this nation than ever war 
did with all its mischiefs. 

1007. Corruption in Public Affairs. 
— Such is the wantonness and almost 
universality of avarice as a corrupting 
agent in public affairs, that it be- 
hooves every man to consider his 
responsibihties before God in this 
matter. The very planks between us 
and the ocean are worm-eaten and 
rotting, when avarice takes hold of 
public integrity ; for avarice is that 
sea-worm, ocean-bred, and swarming 
innumerable, that will pierce the 
toughest planks, and bring the 
stoutest ships to foundering. We 
need reformation in the very begin- 
nings and elements of society. 

1008. Legislative Thievery. — Even 
the men elected for the purpose of re- 
forming such abuse, no sooner 
breathe the moral malaria of the 
legislative halls than virtue is in chills 
and avarice in a fever. Why do we 
think so ill of Sing Sing and so well 
of Albany ? In what are the thieves 
in the Penitentiary worse than the 
thieves in the Legislature ? The 
rogues in prison, acting with but little 
concert, robbed individuals, and 
firms ; the organized rogues, in 
legislative clothing, dishonestly, in 
habiliments of law, rob the community. 

loog. Outbreaking Corruption a 
Symptom. — And so men are robbing 
the community all the way through. 
They organize a system of spoils, by 
a majority here and there ; and they 
are filled full of frauds. And by and 
by when a man a little more compre- 



CIVIC INTERESTS 



219 



hensive, and organized a little more 
skillfully, carries off the very gates of 
the Treasury, as did Samson the 
Gates of Gaza, on his back, we atone 
for our misdeeds by crying out, 
"Thief! thief! thief! thief!" Such 
men are boils breaking out on the 
body politic. You are the body, and 
they are the boils. Look at these 
men and their deeds ; you will see your- 
self, and how you have been acting. 

loio. Corporate Wealth in Politics. 
— Are continental corporations, the 
vast railways, with enormous capital, 
liable to exert no dangerous influence ? 
At present [in 1878] the rival interests 
and conflict of these roads are a suffi- 
cient check. But will it always be 
so? The combined capital of four 
roads running westward from the At- 
lantic must be a thousand million dol- 
lars. . . . The days are near at hand 
when money is to bear a relation to 
politics scarcely yet suspected, not- 
withstanding our recent experiences of 
corruption. If it were in the interest 
of these four vast corporations that a 
certain policy should be pursued, and 
that certain men should be put in 
power to execute them, their concen- 
trated councils and their enormous 
wealth and influence would go far to 
counterbalance all resistance. I do 
not assail the system of the general 
management of railroads. They are 
young, they are lion cubs ; and it is 
wise to consider, while we play with 
them as kittens, what they will do 
when their nails and teeth are grown 
and their haunches are strong ! 

loii. Deterioration in Public Con- 
science. — The growing fashion of de- 
ceit in manufactures and adulterations 
in drugs and foods is the attempt of 
the strong to oppress the weak. It is 
the old robber baron in his castle 
descending, after men have planted 
their crops, and steahng them. It is 



the pirate on the sea pouncing upon 
the merchantman that is laden with 
treasures from abroad, and taking 
possession of them. It is the grasp- 
ing king appropriating the earnings of 
his subjects. Organic dishonesty, 
structural lies in goods, are modes of 
robbing the poor — for there is where 
the evil comes at last. The tendency 
of wrong things is to work out at the 
bottom. The poor are fleeced by 
those who are cunninger than they. 
The weak are oppressed by the strong. 

1 01 2. National Importance of Cities. 
— Cities are the heads of the country. 
They are nerve-plexuses, vital conger- 
ies. They always follow civilization. 
As they produce it, they are produced 
by it. And the prosperity of cities, 
their power, their moral wholesome- 
ness, and their purity, are of trans- 
cendent importance. 

Men talk to you about the great 
mischief which arises from young men 
leaving the country for the city. I 
know that a great deal of mischief 
arises from this cause. And yet, talk- 
ing against it is like talking against the 
wind. You might as well read a les- 
son as to the propriety of the Gulf 
Stream rolling up and warming Eng- 
land and leaving Greenland un- 
touched. It does so, and it will do so. 
Cities will grow and increase in popu- 
lation ; and it is for us to understand 
that effect and take heed to it, so that 
cities shall be the legitimate expres- 
sions of the best part of our civiliza- 
tion. No man is a good citizen, a 
good patriot, or a good Christian, who 
does not care what becomes of the 
cities if only his business thrives and 
his family is happy. 

1013. Municipal Prosperity. — Go 
into the lanes, go into the back streets, 
go where the mechanic lives ; go 
where the day-laborer lives. See 
what is the condition of the streets 



220 



SOCIAL LIFE 



there. See what they do with the 
poor, with the helpless and the mean. 
If the top of society bends perpetually 
over the bottom, with tenderness, if 
the rich and strong arc the best friends 
of the poor and needy, that is a civi- 
lized and a Christian community ; but 
if the rich and the wise are the cream 
and the great bulk of the population 
skim milk, that is not prosperity. 

1 014. American Confidence in the 
Future. — To-day the whole world 
speaks its polyglot language on this 
continent. The time was when the 
nations of the earth were gathered 
round the old Tower of Babel to build 
it, and there was confusion of tongues, 
and they were driven apart from each 
other, and went every whither because 
they could not understand each other ; 
but God has founded this continent as 
a new tower, and men that are speak- 
ing different languages are coming 
together to build it up ; and they do 
understand what each other is saying 
in silent language, and that is, that 



every other man is a brother. What 
was dispersed at the Tower of Babel 
is brought together again in America. 
It is Christian, this confidence in the 
future, this belief in the cducability of 
these men, this belief that there is 
good in them that only needs to be 
evoked to become instrumental of 
better things. 

1015. Endurance of a Righteous Re- 
public. — In all these great opportuni- 
ties our nation has gone right ; and 
the nation will go right. Like a ship 
against which storms are leagued, it 
rolled heavily, it was dashed upon by 
overwhelming waves, only to rear up 
its unharmed hull, and, in darkness or 
in light, against the elements to hold 
on its way, taking no counsel of storm 
or of darkness, but of the compass 
that lay silent before it, an unerring 
guide. The Word of God and the 
righteousness thereof have been our 
compass, and have led us through 
storms and troubles, and will still lead 
us safely. 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 




BEECHER AT FIFTY-SEVEN 
Photograph by Rockwood, 1870 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



XXI. THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



1016. Of the Earth, Earthy. — Some 
men are like pyramids, which are 
very broad where they touch the 
ground, but grow narrower as they 
reach towards the sky. 

1017. Man Needs God. — Many in 
this day set God aside, and hold the 
view that each man, in some sense, is 
another little god in himself. I have 
no sympathy with such a view. None 
shall go further than I in estimating 
the sacredness of man ; but to my 
thought, what man is, he is by virtue 
of his connection with God. Broken 
off, he is like a branch broken off 
from the vine. No matter how fine 
those leaves are, no matter how beau- 
tiful those clusters are, they at once 
begin to wither and shrink, and to- 
morrow will be dissevered from the 
branch, fit for nothing but to be gath- 
ered up and burned. The man in 
whose veins flows the sap of the vine ; 
the man who carries in him the blood 
of Christ ; the man whose reason is 
daily summoned by the inspiration of 
God ; the man whose affections are 
daily purified by the inflowing affec- 
tions of God ; the man who has the 
dependence of weakness and love 
jointly, and lies in the bosom of the 
great All-father, and is strong because 
God is strong, though weak in and of 
himself — that man is sacred. 

ioi8. Body Nourishing Soul 

When you put beans, or seeds of any 
leguminous plant, into the ground, 
there come up great coarse leaves ; 
and the stem feeds on them till the 
plant is able to organize other leaves ; 
it sucks out of them the food which it 
needs till they have served their pur- 



pose ; and then they shrink and die. 
It would seem as though the soul, Hke 
some rare plant, had stored in the 
body such materials that while the 
body was perishing the soul was filled 
with the nutriment that was provided 
for it through the body. 

This is good for a figure or picture, 
though it is not good for a scientific 
analogy or fact. 

1019. Morality Indispensable. — 
Ethics are just as indispensable to 
high Christian experience as fuel is to 
the flame of a fire. Fuel is not flame ; 
but there is no flame without it, or its 
equivalent. So mere ethics, or mo- 
rality, is not spiritual fervor, but it is 
the foundation of it ; and there is no 
spiritual fervor except that which 
comes from the highest ethical devel- 
opment and ministration. 

1020. Lack of Moral Purpose. — 
Men are as leaves that run whispering 
and rustling before the wind because 
it is north, and until the wind turns 
south. Back they come whirling and 
rustling, because of the southern wind. 
Men are dry leaves running before 
whatever breath of wind doth blow 
them. It is a sad picture of the want 
of high moral purpose. 

1021. Morality and Spirituality. — 
If I make a picture of a man, and it is 
a faithful picture, I represent all the 
parts. Suppose I begin at the feet, 
and work up. Well, a man ought to 
have feet. I carry it up to the knees. 
Well, knees are good. I carry it up 
to the trunk. There all the trunk 
organs are ; and they are important. 
I carry it up to the shoulders and 
arms, which are very good things in 



22' 



224 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



this world. Then I am tired, and I 
say, " I guess I won't do any more." 
Now you have a moral man. All the 
parts that I have painted are very im- 
portant ; but the head ought to be 
worth something in a portrait. And 
that which we mean by spiritual re- 
ligion is to all the rest of morality 
what the head is to all the rest of the 
physical organization of a man, 

1022. Morality not Enough. — Do 
not sit down with this morality of 
yours, and think it is enough. I do 
not undertake to make you discon- 
tented with it. So far as it goes it is 
good. The foundation of a house is 
good as far as it goes ; yet it is not 
good for anything if the work is not 
carried up far enough to have a super- 
structure. Morality is the foundation 
in this sense, that in the order of time 
it comes first. 

1023. Small Beginnings Encourag- 
ing. — Do you suppose that a man 
looking for gold refuses to acknowl- 
edge that he sees gold till he finds a 
nugget as big as his head, or guineas 
and eagles, with image and super- 
scription upon them ? When a man 
is looking for gold, if he finds a parti- 
cle as large as a pin's head, he says : 
" There is gold, and it is worth while 
to search further." And when a man 
is looking for nobler good and finds 
the particles and symptoms of it he 
does not refuse to recognize it if it 
does not come stamped with the im- 
age and superscription of God. 

1024. Measure of Morality. — Men 
sometimes ask, " Will morality save 
me?" This is exactly as if the wheat- 
fields, when they have grown three 
inches high, should ask, "Are we 
not good wheat as far as we go?" 
When wheat is grass, it may be on 
the way towards wheat, but it is not 
wheat that a man can grind and eat, 
until it has outgrown its grassage. 



Morality is but the beginning ; it is 
virtue in the germ. It is not stealing, 
not swearing, not doing violence ; in 
short, it is putting off the old man and 
his works without putting on the new 
man. It is the negative, incomplete 
form of religion, 

1025, Incomplete Character, — What 
becomes of those who reach high on 
the plane of morality, but do not 
touch the yet higher plane of spiritual- 
ity ? You might just as well ask me 
what becomes of a marksman who al- 
most hits the mark, but does not hit 
it. You might just as well ask me 
what becomes of an anchor that is let 
out of a ship, and reaches almost to 
the bottom, but stops short without 
touching it. You might as well ask 
me what becomes of a portrait which 
is splendidly painted, and is almost 
like the man that it is designed to rep- 
resent, and yet is not like him. 

1026, Morality but Partial. — It is a 
desirable thing for a grapevine to 
have a good root, but you cannot do 
anything with that alone. It is a very 
desirable thing that every root should 
have a stem, but what are you going 
to do with it ? It is a very desirable 
thing that a stem should have blos- 
soms ; but if a frost comes and cuts 
off your blossoms what are you going 
to do for grapes ? You have lost the 
very thing for which you planted your 
vineyard. Yet all the way up each 
particular step was important. 

Man has to blossom and to bring 
forth the fruit of the spirit, 

1027, Social and Spiritual Life. — 
A man builds him a house two stories 
high ; but money fails, and he does 
not put on any roof. What is he 
going to do now ? Live in it ? He 
cannot live in it. Until somebody 
can put a roof on it, and close it in, it 
is not good to live in. Honesty, 
kindness and neighborliness are good 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



225 



things. Care for the laws of life is a 
very good thing. If this was all of 
our life, if these external and bodily 
relationships represented the sum total 
of all our experience, all that we should 
want would be morality. But we live 
again. We live in a populous realm 
more crowded with entities and real- 
ities than that which we see. We are 
living in this world conformably to 
the world. It is very well as far as the 
world is concerned ; but we are not 
of this world only. Man, a creature 
of two worlds, must conform to the 
necessary laws of this, and also to the 
laws of that other which is higher, and 
more important to his spiritual and in- 
tellectual manhood. 

1028. Morality Better than Nothing. 
— Your mere morality is inferior, it is 
coarse, it is partial, it is threadbare, 
frequently ; but still, poor as it is, you 
would be a great deal poorer without 
it. Shabby as a beggar is, he is bet- 
ter off than if he was stark naked, on 
a cold winter day. But how glorious 
is that clothing of the Spirit that God 
gives to those that ask him in faith and 
in humility ! 

1029. Avoidance of Evil. — I do not 
ridicule nor dissuade from negatives. 
But some seem to abide in them, and 
to think that they have met the re- 
quirements of religion when they have 
withheld themselves from positive 
wrongs ; whereas we are to develop 
the actual graces. There is to be a 
forthputting in things that are right. 
It is not good husbandry that keeps 
the plough going so that no weeds can 
grow, nor anything else. Good hus- 
bandry keeps down the weeds, to be 
sure, but does it for the sake of letting 
corn grow. And there must be a pos- 
itive crop of virtue before all the con- 
ditions of religion are fulfilled. 

1030. Mer"e Morality. — A moral man 
is one that simply defends himself 



from the action of evil. A merely 
moral man is hke an empty bottle, 
well corked, so that no defilement can 
get into it ; so that it may be kept pure 
within. Pure ? And what is the use 
of a bottle that is pure, if it is empty 
and corked up ? A merely moral 
man is negative. His whole hfe is not. 

1031. Virtue not Negative. — Many 
think themselves benevolent because 
they are not malign. If it is virtue in 
a man that he does not steal, and that 
he does not swear, and that he does 
not break the Sabbath, and that he 
does not knock down everybody that 
he meets, and that he does not mur- 
der, and that he does not get drunk, 
and that he does not get angry, — then 
there are many virtuous men. A man 
might abstain from all that, and be no 
more virtuous than a mullein-stalk ; 
for a mullein-stalk stands, and grows, 
and does not do anything wrong. 
Virtue is not negative. 

1032. Selfish Morality. — To gor- 
mandize books is as wicked as to gor- 
mandize food. You have no more 
right to be a literary epicure than to 
be a physical epicure. And if a man 
makes his only aim in life scholarship, 
and lives merely for his own mental 
gratification, he is a criminal. If a 
man follows art simply for his own 
pleasure, he cannot justify himself by 
saying, " I never injured a fly." That 
is not the question. Did you ever 
benefit a fly ? With all your powers 
and opportunities, what have you done 
for the good of others ? You should 
give as well as receive. 

1033. Judgment by General Aim. — 
I can understand how a man may go 
to burn down a house or a city wick- 
edly, and yet, on the march, help up 
a companion if he falls down, give 
him food if he is hungry, and do a 
thousand kind acts. But the wrong 
thing for which he is marching is not 



226 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



inodilied by these incidental kind- 
nesses on the road. You may have a 
great many moralities, a great many 
excellent traits ; and yet, if the great 
end of your life is not divine, is not 
tending towards immortality, you are 
under condemnation. 

1034. Corruption with Propriety. — 
It would be a very small thing for 
the captain of a piratical vessel to 
show that he kept it perfectly clean, 
and that his men were orderly. If a 
vessel is a piratical vessel, that is 
enough to condemn it. Its organiza- 
tion, the purpose of it, is radically and 
atrociously wrong. And these single 
virtues of a man's character are of 
little account, so long as the very 
foundation of his being is corrupt. 

1035. Morality the Root. — Morality 
must precede and underlie all gracious 
religious experiences, as such. With- 
out it, there is as much difference in 
such experiences as there is between 
cut flowers that perish in an hour or 
two, and flowers that, growing on their 
own roots, are nourished by the soil 
and atmosphere. 

1036. Moderate Morality. — There is 
a feeling that there is an adulterated 
morahty, which is better than the 
genuine morahty, as gold alloyed is 
better for use than gold in its pure 
state. It is supposed that if a man 
does not go to extremes, if he does 
not touch devil nor angel, he may 
find between them a convenient me- 
dium by w hich he can make his life 
more successful than by any other 
means. This is a false and mis- 
chievous notion. 

1037. Laws of Life Generally 
Obeyed. — The violations of law we 
notice, but the remunerations by rea- 
son of obedience we do not notice ; 
and it is to be conceded that, taking it 
generally, men obey laws a hundred 
times where they disobey them once. 



Were it not so life would stagger, and 
the end would come. It is with the 
violation of law as it is with the viola- 
tion of truth. A man may be a liar, 
and yet he will tell ninety-nine truths 
where he tells one lie. He has to. 
The truth is the driving force that 
makes the lie good for anything. 

1038. Superficial Betterment. — Some 
men spend their lives in picking off 
dead leaves from the tree of their be- 
ing. They think they are growing 
better because they now and then take 
out their will, like a pruning knife, to 
cut off this and that bough. They im- 
agine they are self-denying because 
they dust themselves over with un- 
pleasant sulphur ; but, all the while, 
they never go to the root, where the 
worm of selfishness is working. 

1039. Right and Wrong. — How 
does the intellect know what is right 
and what is wrong ? Just as it knows 
physical quality — by acquired or by 
transmitted experience. I do not un- 
dertake to say that there is no abstract 
and concrete right and wrong in the 
universe, but I do undertake to say 
that in the scope of human experience 
there is nothing that is right and noth- 
ing that is wrong per se, and that all 
things are right or wrong by the con- 
sequences which ensue or by the mo- 
tives which impel. Is not stabbing 
wrong? If I plunge a knife into a 
man I am a murderer — unless I am a 
surgeon. The act is the same, the 
moral character very different. More- 
over, right and wrong may be a thing 
abstract and perfect, but human 
knowledge of it is experimental, grad- 
ual, and empirical, and the rightest 
things to-day are wrong to-morrow if 
by "to-day" you mean this age and 
by " to-morrow" the next. 

1040. Weak Morality Worthless. — 
Who are the men that are needed in 
this world? Young men that shall 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



227 



bear burdens. We have enough 
mushrooms ; we want oak timber ! 
We have enough men that are willing 
to do anything for the sake of getting 
along ; but what are they worth ? 

1041. Spirituality and Morality. — 
Christianity is a religion whose first, 
middle and last term is, building men 
up into the image of Jesus Christ, in 
their outward life and in their inward 
life, together harmoniously. Read the 
formula, and put the emphasis where 
it belongs, when you are discussing 
this subject : 

" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and mind and soul, 
and strength, aytd [that conjunction 
has hands of iron both ways, and 
holds on to both terms] thy neighbor 
as thyself." It takes hold of spiritual- 
ity and morahty. They are insepa- 
rably conjoined. One is the result of 
the other. They play into each other 
perpetually. 

1042. The Ideal of Manhood. — 
Men's ideas of manhood shape them- 
selves as the tower and spire of 
cathedrals do ; they stand broad at the 
bottom, but grow tapering as they rise, 
and end, far up, in the finest lines, and 
in an evanishing point. Where they 
touch the ground they are most, and 
where they reach to the heaven they 
are least. And such is the ordinary 
conception of manhood. But the true 
ideal should rather be like that most 
princely of all growths, the American 
Elm, which takes firm hold of the 
earth by a thousand corded roots, and 
rises with a fine but columnar trunk, 
which by a division of its boughs 
widens, and in graceful symmetry 
flings abroad avast and glorious mul- 
titude of branches at the top, and is 
thus small near to the earth, and large 
in the upper heavens. 

1043. The Ideal Beyond the Real. 
— It took centuries for ancient art to 



develop to the degree of perfection 
which it at last attained. And so it 
has been with modern art. So far as 
the artist is concerned, not only the 
lower, but the highest steps have been 
accompanied with dissatisfaction and 
forthputting. A true artist mourns to 
the day of his death. He is just 
enough pleased by the fact that he is 
advancing to be comforted and en- 
couraged ; but his advances are always 
pointings to something better, so that 
he is forever behind his ideal. He is 
never without a consciousness that 
there is ahead something more perfect 
than anything that he has yet attained. 

1044. Value of the Unattainable. — 
The things which men cannot perform 
teach them far more than the things 
which they can easily do. What if 
Jacob could not climb the ladder 
whose top was in heaven ? It taught 
him a lesson. It connected the very 
stones under his head with the clouds 
above him, and taught him that there 
was a way, unseen by mortal eyes, 
from the lowest thing to the highest. 

1045. Idealization. — There is a 
power in the human mind, clear and 
distinct, to see things that are not — 
that is, things which the senses would 
say do not exist. A child that sees an 
apple as large as it can hold in its 
hand, has no trouble in imagining an 
apple as large as it can hold in both 
hands, or twenty times as large and 
as beautiful. And it may be more 
powerful in its influence upon the 
child's mind than the thing that is. 

Among the ignorant, in all nations, 
this power of fashioning pictures, 
visions, ideals, has existed ; and it is 
where it has depended upon igno- 
rance that it has led to fantastic vi- 
sions. But, however imperfectly it has 
worked among the nations in times 
gone by, this power of fashioning an 
imaginary thing, and then having that 



228 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



iin.igiiuiry lliiiig come back and act 
upon the soul that fashioned it, has 
been one of the most energizing and 
divine elements in the human compo- 
sition. Rightly used, this power of 
raising up an ideal before the senses ; 
the power to put a better thing in the 
place of the thing that is before you, 
or that you have, lies at the root of 
all growth in the individual, and of 
civihzation in the community. 

1046. Ideals Must be High. — A 
law, to be of any use to you, must be 
higher than your practice under it. 
There is no use in your attempting to 
learn to write, when already you can 
write as well as the copy. There is 
no use in your going to school when 
you know as much as your master. 
And no rule, no principle, is of any 
great use to a man unless it is in ad- 
vance of his attainments. 

1047. Hero-Worship. — I remem- 
ber, as if it were but yesterday, the 
time when Kossuth, the great Hunga- 
rian hero, made his magnificent pas- 
sage from Castle Garden up through 
Broadway. I remember the surging 
of the people. I remember the wealth 
of enthusiasm that was manifested. I 
remember the helplessness of that 
roar which rolled like a storm-wave 
upon the shore of the ocean, and 
which seemed feeble and unimpressive 
as compared with what the people 
wanted to do. And I could not help 
feeling how the human heart longs 
for something to worship. I could 
not but think how, when you bring 
before men, embodied, that which 
answers to their conception of hero- 
ism, their whole soul goes out yearning 
for it. Men who are inexpert, love to 
gaze upon expert men. Cowards like 
to see heroes. All humanity, by its 
very consciousness of weakness, by 
its very infirmities, by the dim light 
of its aspirations, longs to find some- 



thing that is divine. There are things 
in every man that are reaching out 
after the God. 

1048. New Ideals Given by Christ. 
— Ideals are the true germs of growth. 
No benefactor is hke him who fills 
life with new and fruitful ideals. 
Christ gave to every duty a new 
motive. Every virtue had an aspira- 
tion for something yet nobler. He 
carried forward the bounds of life, 
and assured immortality to the world 
as a new horizon. He blew away the 
mists of the schools, and the nature 
of God shone out with redoubled 
radiance. 

1049. Luminous Natures. — One 
man has kindness deep within him ; 
and when the occasion comes, such a 
man's heart, too long clouded, hke a 
sun in a storm-muffled day, shoots 
through some opening rift, and glows 
for a period in glory. But there are 
other natures that are always cloud- 
less. With them, a cloud is the ex- 
ception, shining is the rule. 

1050. New Ideals. — A certain 
master of painting in Germany on 
going to Italy, and first seeing the 
work of the Venetian and Roman 
schools, said to himself, "I have 
spent my life for nothing." No, he 
had not. He was a master according 
to the light he had received up to 
that time, but he had not before re- 
ceived a conception which lifted him, 
with new inspiration, into a realm un- 
speakably higher than that in which 
he had been working. 

1 05 1. Broad Views of Truth. — I 
am building a house ; it is on a hill ; 
and I Uke it all the better for being 
there. I always like to know what 
everybody else knows, and to go as 
high as everybody else goes. So, 
when I see my carpenters mounting 
up to the ridge-pole and rafters I want 
to mount up there too, and I do ; and 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



229 



when I get on the scaffold that sur- 
mounts the tall chimneys, I delight, 
from that elevation, to survey every- 
thing below, because I get a better idea 
of the relative magnitudes of the objects 
within the range of my vision than I 
could if I stood on the plain under- 
neath. So the higher a man goes 
spiritually, rising on the wings of 
thought and imagination, the broader 
will be the range of his vision and the 
truer will be his sense of sight and 
his perception of the proportions of 
things. 

1052. Spiritual Oppression. — There 
is a danger in lofty ideals, which we 
must recognize. That conception of 
holiness which was easy to Jonathan 
Edwards, because he was a poet and 
an ethical genius, was impossible to 
men of slender intellect, of no imagi- 
nation, and of a penurious moral 
sense. In this unconscious way great 
natures oppress the weak. It is put- 
ting children to the stride of the giant. 

1053. Prophet and Poet. — How 
little are the close-cut wings of the 
modern imagination prepared to fol- 
low the circuits of men who dwelt in 
this upper picture-world, where the 
reason was inspired through the im- 
agination ! Poets, nearest of all, are 
in sympathy with the prophets ; but 
they mostly sing in the boughs, low 
down, and not from the clear air 
above. The whole life of the prophet 
was absorbed into an intense spiritual 
intuition. The moral faculties of the 
human soul have this susceptibility to 
ecstatic exaltation, and therefore the 
prophetic mood was in so far natural. 
But these faculties never unfold into 
the ecstatic visions of prophecy except 
by the direct impulse of the Divine 
power. And herein the prophetic 
differs from the merely poetic. 

1054. Hours of Vision. — There is 
many a time, while making your 



vogage on the ocean of life, that a 
star shines out. It is visible only a 
moment ; but if you make haste you 
can catch an observation, and then 
you will know just where you are, 
and you can sail on with trust in God, 
and with the guidance of that silent 
monitor that points the invisible way. 

1055. Clouded Vision.— At Cornell 
University, a professor speaking with 
me on the subject of an observatory, 
said, " I hope they will never establish 
one here." "Why?" "Because 
the locality is utterly unfit for celestial 
observations. Cayuga Lake is noth- 
ing but a fog factory. Every night 
it breeds so much fog and fills the 
atmosphere with so much vapor that 
it is not until late in the day that you 
can get any clear view of the sky ; 
and hardly three nights in the whole 
year have been fit for a critical ob- 
servation of the heavens." The 
clouds that go up around the human 
observatory prevent men from seeing 
clearly — clouds of passions, clouds of 
appetites, clouds of all kinds of evil 
feelings from the animal man. He 
cannot often make observations of 
celestial things. 

1056. Spiritual Moods. — As travel- 
ers, who have beheld the city which 
lies before them, by reason of hills 
and inequalities make circuits and 
lose sight thereof, and gain it again, 
so we lose sight of Thee, and catch 
again the blessed face. 

1057. Aspiration. — Every man is 
born with aspiration. It does not 
develop in every man. Neither do 
half the buds in trees blossom. But 
they are there. And there is aspira- 
tion in every man, whether you sus- 
pect it or not, and though it may not 
blossom. Aspiration means tendril, 
twining, or anything else by which 
one vines upward, holding on by the 
way to whatever will support him. 



230 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



Some plants take hold by winding 
around, some by little roots, some by 
tendrils, some by hooks, and some by 
leaves that catch like anchors. But 
these things take hold not for the 
sake of staying where they take hold, 
but only that they may climb higher. 
And so it is with men. We clasp 
things above us by every part of our 
nature, one after another, not for the 
sake of remaining where we take hold, 
but that we may go higher. 

1058. Growth of Ideals. — Obedience 
will bring a man nearer to a rule, but 
obedience will not bring a man nearer 
to his ideal law. That goes on. It 
never is so small as when he touches 
it with perfect obedience. It opens ; 
it effulges ; it hangs higher and 
higher, brighter and brighter, in the 
heavens, and the further he travels 
towards it, the further he is from it. 
The indispensable condition of our 
growth and development, therefore, is 
that by advancing towards our ideals 
in attempting to fulfill them, we thrust 
them further from us. 

1059. Man's Ignorance of Himself. 
— Men were made to be happy. 
Never was a music-box so exquisitely 
arranged for the playing of sweet 
tunes, as the human organism is for 
the production of the music of happi- 
ness. The trouble is, we wind it up 
the wrong way. The instrument slides 
out of measure, and we play three or 
four tunes wrong, and mixed together. 
A most discordant thing, therefore, 
is man, although exquisitely organized 
for happiness. We have been learn- 
ing how to use many things. We 
know how to use the stars better ; we 
know how to use wood and iron 
better ; we know how to use wind and 
steam better ; we know how to use 
ten thousand things better ; but alas ! 
our chief ignorance is in that which 
concerns ourselves. 



1060. Knowledge of God Must 
Grow. — A great many persons sup- 
posed that the knowledge of God can 
be thrown into the human soul, in- 
stead of being learned gradually in 
unfolding. The facts go against it. 
Some would seem to think we are noth- 
ing in the world but a photographic 
plate, and that God is to come before 
us and shine in, and there will be the 
photograph of him. That docs very 
well for photography, but very poorly 
for Deity. 

1061. Soul-Creation, — Because the 
soul is evolved in the process of evo- 
lution with the body, according to the 
method and design of God, it is not 
necessary to infer that God is not the 
creator of the soul as well as of the 
body. An architect builds me a 
house, and he sends for the workmen, 
and they dig the cellar ; but he never 
touches a spade. He sends for the 
stone-mason, who brings out from the 
quarry the foundation stones, and puts 
them up ; but the architect never 
touches them. He sends for the brick- 
maker who makes a million brick, but 
the architect never touches the clay. 
He sends for the carpenter, the plas- 
terer and other workmen ; and they do 
the work in their several departments ; 
and by and by the house is completed. 
Did the architect build that house, or 
did he not ? 

1 062 . Flesh Cannot Discern Spirit. — 
The natural man, the basilar man, the 
under man, the physical man, cannot 
discern the things of the spirit. We 
see this every day, not only as ap- 
plied to imagination in its highest 
reaches, but in the ordinary inter- 
course of men. A man in a rage 
cannot understand the emotions of 
peace. A man that is grasping and 
unfair is not in a state to consider 
justice and equity between man and 
man. All prejudices and all emotions 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



231 



inspired by li;itred or by selfishness 
twist the mind. It gets awry. You 
are obhged to discharge these in- 
fluences before you can form an 
equitable judgment of what is truth in 
any case of controversy or conflict. 

1063. Spiritual Discernment. — The 
world is agreed that there is no use of 
disputing in matters of taste. Taste is 
one of those things which cannot be 
brought to the measure of ordinary 
evidence. If a fugue of Bach is 
delicious to a man, it is so to him, no 
matter how many credible persons say 
it is not to them ; and no argument 
can overthrow that fact, so far as he 
is concerned. If it is not delicious, 
then it is not ; and you do not need 
any argument on the subject. If a 
man has a poetic vision, he has it 
though ten thousand equally trust- 
worthy men say they have it not. It 
is a matter of fact. If there are 
twenty astronomers equally measured 
in intellect and power, and one of them 
says, " I have discovered a satellite," 
or " I have discovered a comet," and 
the other nineteen say, "We have 
not," that does not invalidate the tes- 
timony of him who has. The trained 
scientist, who has taken an obser- 
vation, and who knows that he has 
seen an object, is not to be judged by 
those who have not seen it. Spiritual 
facts, spiritually discerned, may not 
be disputed by those who see them 
not. 

1064. Spiritual Life not Gauged by 
Senses. — Shall the chief justice of the 
United States be compelled to plead 
before a mere justice of the peace? 
Shall not every record of a justice of 
the peace go up to superior courts and 
terminate at last in the great national 
court ? And what are the eye, the 
tongue and the hand but mere justices' 
courts, not useless by any means, but 
of a lower order ? While I give all 



heed to physical life, and to truths 
that are determined by physical meth- 
ods, there are truths of the human 
mind which cannot be touched by the 
physicist. They are parts of human 
experience which are more exalted 
and are far truer to man's conscious- 
ness and feeling than if they were seen 
by the outward eye. 

1065. Flesh and Spirit. — Men are 
measured on the cob, for the most 
part, in this life. To be sure, the cob 
is nurse to the young kernels which 
suck out of it their nutriment as the 
child sucks its nutriment from the 
mother's breast ; and when they have 
taken from it all that they need, it 
dries up and becomes waste and use- 
less ; but, alas, that it should be the 
reverse in human life ! The inward 
man that ought to be growing fat and 
large by sucking at the outward man 
is too often growing small and lean, 
while the outward man is growing 
strong and jolly. 

io56. The Inward Life. — Every per- 
son of richness of soul will recognize 
the truth, that the dearest part of his 
life — that which seems to him the 
finest, the noblest, the deepest — never 
is fully and fairly exposed. And if 
you think a moment, you are con- 
scious that all those subtlest senti- 
ments, those rarest feelings, which, 
when they manifest themselves in you 
with power, give you some sentiment 
of divinity, are the strains of the soul 
which you cannot speak, and certainly 
do not. There are elements of con- 
scious life that move and control out- 
ward action, which lie coiled up like 
the spring of a watch, in a chamber 
which is not opened, but out of which 
issues a power that carries the whole. 

1067. Spirituality Misunderstood. — 
It is impossible for essential vulgarity 
of spirit to comprehend delicacy and 
refinement. Avarice cannot under- 



232 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



stand generosity. A glutton cannot 
know the pleasure of temperance. 
Hate and envy cannot sympathize 
with loving-kindness, nor cruelty with 
tender mercies. Men who were thor- 
ouglily corrupt could not understand 
even human truth as men essentially 
good, and still less rise to an intuition 
of divine things. The single sentence 
of Jesus, He that h of God heareth 
God' s words ; ye therefore hear them 
not because ye are not of God, — this is 
a touchstone. It tells human char- 
acter and classifies men, not by arti- 
ficial tests, but by their very nature. 

1068. The Value of Sentiment. — 
" This is my anointing ; I accept it as a 
thing done beforehand, in honor of my 
burial." That put it on a ground 
which they could understand, "And 
what this woman has done, wherever 
my gospel shall be preached to the 
end of the world, it shall be a memo- 
rial of her." 

This is one of the blossom scenes in 
the history of Christ. A kind of ex- 
quisite element runs through it. There 
is very little outwardness to it. The 
scene itself is remarkable on many 
accounts : but the chord struck is one 
that every rude hand does not strike ; 
and it does not vibrate to any except 
the truest touch. It is, in an indirect 
way, the value put upon sentiment, as 
distinguished from all other useful or 
excellent things. 

The perfume of that broken vase 
has now been exhaling for two thou- 
sand years, and the odor of it fills the 
heavens, and is sweet in perfume to- 
day ; it is recognized by hundreds and 
thousands more than in the days when 
the words were spoken. 

1069. The Hidden Life.— The soul 
is formless, is shadowless. No eye 
beholds it ; no hand handles it ; no 
pencil may draw its lineaments. Our 
life is hinted, but it is hidden. It 



gleams out at times ; it flashes in 
sparks upon us. None has seen the 
full orb, or known the full measure of 
it. We are Uke books in which some 
things are to be hidden from the com- 
mon reader as unsafe, and at every 
few paragraphs the critical things are 
expressed in a dead language. So in 
human life, the surface-things are read ; 
the interior is not legible. 

1070. Soiled by Worldliness. — The 
worst things in men are the least in- 
jured by worldliness, just as the hard- 
est part of a tree suffers the least by 
handling. The finer emotions of the 
mind are like blossoms that will not 
bear being handled much, that be- 
come quickly soiled, and that soon 
wilt and wither. 

1071. Soul-Treasures. — Down deep 
in the sea some of the most beautiful 
things of earth are hidden. Now and 
then there are rocking storms that 
wash the very bottom, and roll on 
shore a shell that is but a specimen of 
thousands and thousands of exquisite 
forms and tints which defy the palette 
of the painter. But not the things 
that grow in the sea or in the wilder- 
ness are so beautiful or so numerous 
as those that grow in the secrecy of 
the souls of those who have been 
touched by the divine life ; and though 
you can measure a man's outer life, 
only God can measure his inward life. 

1072. Effluence of Goodness. — As 
we know the odorous vines of rare 
and exquisite flowers which are grown 
behind high, opaque garden walls 
only by the fragrance which they waft 
to us through the air, while they them- 
selves are invisible ; so are we con- 
scious of the heavenly and spiritual 
elements of noble natures about us, 
rather by their effects upon us than by 
any open spectacle of them. 

1073. The Hidden Man. — The soul 
is like a prince who receives embassies 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



^33 



I 



from all the provinces round about ; 
presents and tribute come to him from 
the uttermost parts of the earth. The 
air, the storms, all human occupations, 
all governments, individual men and 
combinations of men, pleasures — all 
bring influence to this potentate, the 
hidden man of the soul. Then in 
turn, the soul sends forth energy, 
speech, will ; and as the tide that 
swells and fills the harbor, then re- 
flows and seeks again the great ocean, 
so the flux and reflux of force between 
mind and the physical world is a 
greater though an invisible and a 
silent tide. 

1074. Inward Ornaments. — If you 
will wear ornaments outwardly, God 
bless you in that ; but see to it that for 
every outward pearl there is a pearl 
within ; that for every diamond outside 
there are caves of diamonds inside ; 
that for everything that is beautiful 
either in hair, or dress, or ornament 
there is something richer for the 
grander, the hidden, life of the soul. 

1075. Soul-Purity. — Quenching all 
under-hghts of tropical fervor that 
breed miasm in the soul, whatsoever 
things are pure in thought, pure in the 
imagination, pure in the whole range 
of the senses, pure in all the expe- 
rience of a man's passional life, are to 
be accepted and obeyed. 

1076. Intents of the Heart. — A great 
deal of our heart hfe is cryptogamous 
— mosses and inconspicuous blooms 
hidden in the grass, thoughtlets, the 
intents of the heart. We are hardly 
aware of this life ; but as God sees in 
winter all the flowers which are yet 
sleeping beneath the soil, so he sees 
all the hidden feelings of our hearts. 
He knows every root, and what will 
spring from it, and comprehends its 
intents, which are yet but germs, as 
well as its thoughts, which have al- 
ready blossomed. 



1077. Value of Soul-Life. — A book 
is an invention by which men live 
after they are dead, so far as this 
world is concerned, A hymn or song 
that deserves to live is lifted above 
persecution. The tyrant or despot 
cannot touch it. But oh ! neither 
book, nor hymn, nor song, nor any 
product of the human mind, is to be 
compared with the immortal life itself ; 
and ye that save one soul, and hft it, 
by the power of your instrumentahty, 
blessed of God, into the sphere of im- 
mortality and glory, shall shine as the 
stars in the firmament ! 

1078. The Soul's Riches. — If a man 
has oil in his can, every drop he pours 
out makes his supply one drop less. 
There is no springing up from the bot- 
tom to prevent diminution in the 
supply. It is not so with the soul. 
The nature of that is to renew its 
supply, so that the more you draw 
from it, the more there is to draw. 
Giving will make any soul richer. 

1079. The Soul Made Manifest. — 
There cannot be any strong inward 
feeling of affection, or passion, that 
has not its outward expression. 
Sooner may a furnace be glowing hot 
and emit no heat, sooner may a lamp 
be burning and give out no light, than 
a man possessing the highest and 
noblest qualities can avoid showing 
them by involuntary action as well as 
by voluntary purpose. 

1080. Expression by Deeds. — There 
are many persons in life like Mary 
Magdalene, who have deep, abiding, 
almost painful emotions which find no 
outlet. She could not with eloquent 
tongue respond to Jesus, nor recite 
how he had aroused in her a new and 
deeper life. There come hours to 
those who are richly endowed when 
their deepest thoughts must at last 
rain out. As clouds hanging for days 
and days in the atmosphere, and do- 



234 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



ing Jiotliing, at hist gather themselves 
together, and pour down refreshing 
showers ; so there are persons of na- 
tures rich and strong who patiently 
await the gathering of sentiment in 
their souls. There must be some out- 
let at last ; and if it cannot be in lan- 
guage it must be by deed. This 
woman was modest and retiring : yet 
in the presence of that great company 
she undertook to express her silent 
adoration and her love by unstopping 
the vase of precious ointment, and 
pouring it upon the head of Christ. 

1081. Refinement not to be Exclu- 
sive. — I do not object to elective affin- 
ities ; I do not say that men who are 
like each other in intellectual pursuits 
shall not company together ; but they 
must not separate themselves from 
their kind. There is no refinement 
and no genius in any direction that 
will redeem you from the charge of 
treason to your fellow-men if you 
make your gifts of beauty and excel- 
lence a gulf-digging instrument that 
shall create separation. All good 
draws men to men ; and the sign that 
a man is a gentleman is his consider- 
ation for those around him. The 
sign that a man is educated is the 
largeness of his sympathy — not the 
narrowness of it. The sign that one 
is truly refined is not that there is a 
Desert of Sahara in his soul, but that 
he blossoms like a prairie, and that 
his sympathy is as wide as the horizon. 
1082. Spiritual Union. — Christ was 
not so much with his disciples when 
wearing a human body, and walking 
with them, as after his ascension. He 
did not go so much away from them 
when taken into heaven, as he had 
done while on earth. He had been 
separated from them, as it were, while 
in the body. 

The eye, the ear, the hand, cannot 
connect us with each other ; for al- 



though we gaze, although we listen, 
although we clasp electric hands, it is 
something within the flesh to which 
the eye makes its report, to which the 
ear makes its report, to which every 
sense makes its report. Every man 
is conscious of something inside that 
is not of the body. It is the soul that 
finds the soul. It is spirit that recog- 
nizes spirit. Inward spiritual unity is 
first ; and the unity of sense is but its 
representative or symbol. The only 
substantial union of affection is that 
which comes from the touching of 
soul with soul. 

1083. The Sin-Sick Soul.— Let the 
body ache, and a man will be up and 
eager, and suffer many things of many 
physicians, as the woman did, and 
will be none the better for it, but 
much worse. That is only the body ; 
but the soul is sicker, weaker, cor- 
rupter, more defiled, and more full — 
or should be — of piercing, spiritual 
pains. But where is our anxiety ? 
Where is our resort to God ? Do you 
come to Jesus Christ, yourself, with 
your own spiritual troubles ? 

1084. Spiritism and Spiritual Long- 
ing. — Whether spirits can communi- 
cate with me or not, I can almost 
communicate with them. It is not so 
much the stalactites as the stalagmites 
that I am looking after. Those crys- 
talline columns that hang down from 
the roof of the cave are stalactites ; 
but there rise up also from the floor 
equally crystalline columns which are 
stalagmites. In my thought springs 
up the longing of my soul for honor, 
for perfect love, for a sense of recti- 
tude and purity, for the society of the 
spirits of just men made perfect ; and 
these longings aspire upward. 

1085. Men Without Aspiration. — 
There are multitudes that are like my 
Wistaria : a plant of the loveliest 
habit. I planted it early, and I got a 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



235 



little dwarf, stumpy vine, tree-like, 
not two feet high. I waited one year, 
two years, three years, four years, un- 
til I got out of all patience with it, 
and I said to the gardener, "Take it 
up ; throw it away." He took it up, 
but planted it in a more favorable 
corner, where something happened, I 
know not what, in the mystery of Na- 
ture, and the very next year it broke 
its bonds and sent up its vine, and 
clasped and clambered and covered 
all the end of the house, and ran up 
on to the adjacent trees, and filled the 
whole air with its perfume and with 
the beauty of its blossom. Multitudes 
of men there are just like it, living so 
near the ground, and without any 
aspiration, that they never know what 
they are, in themselves, and to what 
their possibilities may lead up. 

1086. Unknown Powers of the Soul. 
— God's will, or mind, may be sup- 
posed to act upon the human mind, 
either through ordinary laws, or di- 
rectly, without any intermediate in- 
struments. In the case of direct in- 
fluence the result would be not merely 
a quickening of faculties, but an ex- 
altation of the mind to a higher plane, 
on or around which play new energies 
or forces. In this direction, it may be, 
we shall find a philosophy of miracle, 
of the powers of faith, of prophecy, 
of a human control of matter which 
allies exalted manhood to the creative 
power of God. Such an augmented 
power of the human soul was unques- 
tionably taught by Jesus. 

He who enters upon the theme of 
the interaction of the human mind 
and the Divine mind, launches upon 
a wide and solemn sea, fathomless, 
shoreless, and dark, as yet. Better 
than Columbus sailing westward, will 
come Jesus to quell the wave, illumine 
the darkness, and reveal the shore. 
The human soul is yet to be explored. 



1087. Man's Indifference to God. — 
We could hardly help striking a man 
who should stand looking upon Niag- 
ara Falls without exhibiting emotions 
of awe and admiration. We should 
say to ourselves, "Let us be rid of 
such an unsusceptible creature as 
that." Now I ask you to pass upon 
yourselves the same judgment. What 
do you suppose angels, that have 
trembled and quivered with ecstatic 
joy in the presence of God, think, 
when they see how indifferent you are 
to the Divine love and goodness in 
which you are perpetually bathed, 
and by which you are blessed and 
sustained every moment of your lives ? 
How can they do otherwise than ac- 
cuse you of monstrous ingratitude and 
moral insensibility ? 

1088. Longing for God. — Even the 
poor mute root in the cellar, that lies 
all winter long — the turnip, or the po- 
tato — dead, yet knows when April and 
May come, and knows that there is a 
sun outside, and begins to sprout, and 
finds its way, growing in the dark with 
long, long vines ; and if there be a 
slit or a crack, it will work towards 
the light. And shall not I, that am 
no root nor vegetable, no matter 
through what winters, find my way 
towards the great Center of warmth 
and light? If there is summer in 
heaven I will find it. I shall see God 
for myself, and not another for me. I 
shall be like him yet, though it may 
be myriads of ages hence. 

1089. God's Brooding Love. — Let 
the eagle lay her eggs, and leave them 
alone in the nest, and there will never 
be another eagle. It is not until she 
brings her bosom's warmth down to 
them, and sits patiently upon them, 
that they cease to be eggs and become 
eaglets. And in a sense it may be 
said that this body is nothing but a 
nest, and that the superior spiritual 



236 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



elements in a man arc simply inherited 
qualities ; and it is only when the 
warmth of the bosom of God has 
broken the shell and brought us out, 
that we really become sons of God. 

logo. Intellection Inimical to Feel- 
ing. — I have known many persons 
who, when they began to feel a cer- 
tain sweet joy in singing a hymn, 
would check themselves and say, 
" Have I a right to this feehng ? Does 
it proceed from the proper source ? ' ' 
It is exactly as though a bird should 
commence to sing on a tree close by 
your dwelling, and you should say to 
yourself, " I wonder if that is the bird 
that I heard yesterday " ; and you 
should run to the window to see, and 
frighten it so that it would stop sing- 
ing and fly away. If any feeling be- 
gins to sing on the bough of hope, the 
moment you say, " Stop, let me see 
the construction of its vocal organs," 
that moment it stops singing. If an 
emotion of sympathy with justice and 
conscience springs up in your bosom, 
the moment you say, " Let me see 
how it is coming," that moment it 
ceases to be. The moment you look 
at a feeling, the feeling stops, and in- 
tellection begins, thus revolutionizing 
the whole process of the mind. 

1091. God in the Soul. — Before 
the child is born the mother's blood, 
circulating through the little body, 
gives it both food and life ; it is the 
mother rushing through the child that 
is the child's life and hope ; and it 
may be said that in some similar way 
there comes a state in which we are in 
such relations to God that his thoughts 
are impulsing our minds, and his feel- 
ings are in circulation through our de- 
sires and appetences. 

1092. Sympathetic Witnesses. — 
When a musician is called before a 
great congregation to perform music 
which he has composed, he knows 



that many will call for melodies, for 
ballads, for simple airs, and he may 
be disposed to gratify their taste ; but 
if he knows that in the congregation 
there is one Mozart, or one Beethoven, 
who is able to follow him through all 
the intricacies of harmony, as he rises 
up to the majesty of sound that ex- 
presses thought, and feeling, and im- 
agination, that one single musician 
will inspire him and reward him more 
than the thousands of those who know 
only how to take in the lowest forms. 

Now, we not only live among men, 
but there are airy hosts, blessed 
spectators, sympathetic lookers-on, 
that see and know and appreciate our 
thoughts and feelings and acts. And 
if we can bring ourselves to reahze 
this, it will lift us above the necessity 
of vulgar praise, and above any de- 
pression that we may feel for the want 
of appreciation and praise from men. 

1093. Memory of Benefits. — Among 
the Alps, when the day is done, and 
twilight and darkness are creeping 
over fold and hamlet in the valleys be- 
low, Monte Rosa and Mont Blanc rise 
up far above the darkness, catching 
from the retreating sun something of 
his light, flushed with rose-color, ex- 
quisite beyond all words or pencil or 
paint, glowing like the'gate of heaven. 
And so past favors and kindnesses hft 
themselves up in the memory of noble 
natures ; and long after the lower 
parts of life are darkened by neglect, 
or selfishness, or anger, high up above 
all clouds they glow with divine radi- 
ance, and seem to forbid the advance 
of night any further. 

1094. Grateful Natures. — The least 
drop of dew will make the grape- 
blossom sweet. The least moisture 
will make the mignonette report it- 
self through all the garden. The 
honeysuckle does not ask much. The 
night-devk's are enough for it. And 



THE SPIRITUAL NATURE 



237 



there are some natures that take but 
the sHghtest favors to make them ex- 
hale thanks and gratitude. 

1095. — Gratitude as a Motive Power, 
— If when the building was burning 
some heroic fireman, willingly imperil- 
ing his own life, rushed into the smoke 
and flame, and came out again bear- 
ing the only child of your heart to you, 
you would feel that the earth could 
not repay him, and your heart would 
long for more than your hand owned, 
that you might give him something 
adequate to your sense of obligation. 
When men have befriended us, suf- 
fered for us, periled themselves for us, 
the whole of every noble feeling 
within us rises up and pours out like a 
flood from the temple of the soul, and 
we go to them with beneficences and 
benefactions. How should our souls 
be flooded with gratitude to Christ ! 

1096. Appreciative Gratitude. — If 
one should give me a dish of sand, 
and tell me there were particles of iron 
in it, I might look for them with my 
eyes, and search for them with my 
clumsy fingers, and be unable to de- 
tect them ; but let me take a magnet 
and sweep through it, and how would 
it draw to itself the almost invisible 
particles, by the mere power of attrac- 
tion ! The unthankful heart, like my 
finger in the sand, discovers no mer- 
cies ; but let the thankful heart sweep 
through the day, and as the magnet 
finds the iron, so it will find in every 
hour some heavenly blessings. Only, 
the iron in God's sand is gold. 

1097. Everyday Gratitude. — I never 
shall forget, and I never shall cease 
to be stirred up at the thought of, 
what I heard in Antwerp, where they 
have a large collection of bells, run- 
ning from the very low ones clear up 
to those which it seemed to me were 
no bigger than thimbles, such was the 
fineness with which they rang out their 



tiny melodies. A clock strikes every 
quarter hour. At the quarter-hour 
striking there come first deep tones. 
Then delicate sounds rush out through 
the air, playing an overture, as it were, 
in listening to which one would think 
all God's angels were frohcking in the 
steeple. Thus the clock moved off 
with wonderful majesty and beauty. 
I sat for hours within sight and sound 
of it, and thought what a marvelous 
thing that old stone steeple was, 
which, day and night, busied itself in 
making music in the air. No matter 
what was going on below, it sent forth 
the voices of love, of hope, of gladness, 
of courage, which sounded through the 
year, summer and winter, from morn- 
ing till evening, and from evening till 
morning. Then and there I made up 
my mind that I would be musical, if I 
possibly could, so long as I lived. I 
do not carry as many bells as that 
steeple does, and I have had hard work 
to keep in tune, but as I grow older I 
feel the necessity of recognizing on 
every side, in nature and in human 
society, reasons for thanksgiving. 

1098. Inspiration of Great Lives. — 
Some stories, when you analyze them, 
cease to be stories, and become phi- 
losophies. Joan of Arc has thrown 
around heroism an inspiration which 
makes it richer and more glorious. I 
do not care whether she saved or lost 
France, — there may be some fiction 
on that subject ; — but she saved the 
world, and lifted it up many degrees. 

1099. Spiritual Ancestry. — We love 
to trace our ancestry to early houses 
and families in the old country. 
Neither is this vain or foolish. It may 
become so through abuse, but it is not 
so of necessity. 

But mere bodily ancestry is the low- 
est form of a great truth. The soul 
gives relationship. All who have 
lived, and, by God's help, poured 



^38 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



their life as a soul-wine forth for the re- 
freshment of the world, are my ances- 
tors, my relations. All the patriarchs 
are mine. All judges of Israel ; all 
prophets and holy priests ; all religious 
kings and patriotic men ; all apostles, 
ministers, and confessors ; all holy 
men of the cloister, in ages when the 
cloister benefited society ; the heroes 
of dungeons and scaffolds ; the wit- 
nesses for liberty in every age, and 
everywhere, — these men seem to us 
dim and shadowy ; but we love to go 
back and make them more substantial. 
We love to search those long forgot- 
ten, and give them resurrection, and 
claim them as our own. I go back to 
them with fervent joy. Their blood is 
mine. It beats in me ; for the blood of 
Christ it is that makes of one blood all 
good men on earth. 

iioo. "Blessed are the Meek." — 
Meekness is generally thought to be a 
sweet benignity under provocation. 
But provocation only discloses, and 
does not create it. It exists as a 
generic mood or condition of soul, in- 
dependent of those causes which may 
bring it to light. In this state, power 
and peace are harmonized, — activity 
and tranquillity, joy and calmness, all- 
seeingness without violence or desire. 
From these nobler fountains chiefly 
are to flow those influences which shall 
control the world. 

iioi. "Blessed are the Merciful." 
— Mercy is an attribute of high moral 
character. As men grow towards the 
Divine, they become gentle, forgiving, 
compassionate. The absence of a 
merciful spirit is evidence of the want 
of true holiness. A soul that has 
really entered into the life of Christ 
carries in itself a store of nourish- 
ment and a cordial for helpless souls 
around it. 

1 1 02. "Blessed are the Peace- 
makers." — Peace is not a negative 



state, a mere interval between two 
excitements. In its highest meaning 
it is that serenity which joy assumes, 
not only when single faculties are ex- 
cited, but when the whole soul is in 
harmony with itself and full of whole- 
some activity. 

Though the lower stages of being 
are full of agitations, the higher stages 
are tranquil. The universe grows 
sweet as it grows ripe. " The God of 
peace" is the highest expression of 
perfect being. Whatever disturbance 
is raging in his remote creation, he 
dwells in eternal peace, influencing the 
consummation of all things. There 
is evident reason why peacemakers 
" shall be called the children of God." 

1103. "Blessed are They Who 
Hunger and Thirst after Righteous- 
ness." — As hunger is not a rational 
faculty, and does not depend upon any 
of the rational faculties for its action, 
but follows the internal condition of 
the body, and is an automatic sign 
and signal of the waste or repair going 
on within, so the longing for upright- 
ness and goodness must be a deep- 
seated and incessant importunity of 
the soul's very substance, as it were, 
acting, not upon suggestion or special 
excitement, but self-aroused and con- 
tinuous. To such a desire the whole 
world becomes a ministering servant. 

1 104. Religious Inspirations Evan- 
escent. — In some old cathedrals in 
Europe, where there are finely-built 
organs, they are accustomed, at twi- 
light, to play out the day by some 
solemn anthems ; and people gather, 
and stand scattered through the great 
dusky structure, and listen as the in- 
spired man touches the instrument and 
swells to the high accord of his theme. 
All hearts are moved. A thousand 
memories are awakened in each 
breast. The feelings of many a one 
are soothed and laid to rest. All are 



GOD 



239 



filled with emotions of joy. At last 
the theme closes, the music dies away, 
and silence reigns. One by one the 
people steal out of the house. The 
music is gone, the organ is silent ; and 
so is the experience. The church is 
not more empty of sound when the 
organ stops, than are their hearts of 
the feelings which the music inspired. 
The proud man is proud yet ; the ava- 
ricious man is avaricious yet ; the 
worldly man is worldly yet. What 
has taken place ? They have had a 
repast. They went to the church, and 
the organ played on them, as the or- 
ganist played on it. And the tran- 
sient, momentary experience came 
and passed away almost in the same 
moment. Too many spiritual experi- 
ences of men, under the influence of 
God's preachers of righteousness, fade 
away in the same manner. 

1 105. Passing Impressions of Good. 
— You will go away from here to- 
night, and the sound of my voice will 
be like the sound of a bell that strikes 
resonantly through the air, and gradu- 
ally spends itself and is gone. As 
you go out, you will think of the 



truth that the sermon attempted to set 
forth. It will, perhaps, linger in your 
thoughts to-morrow ; but it will gradu- 
ally recede from your memory, and 
next week it will be forgotten. 

1 106. Jesus Leaves Galilee. — The 
Voice ceased. The crowd disap- 
peared. The light that had sparkled 
along the waters and fired the distant 
hills went out. Twilight came on ; 
the evening winds whispered among 
the rustling reeds, and the ripples 
gurgling upon the beach answered 
them in liquid echoes. The boom of 
the solitary bittern came over the 
waters, and now and then, as dark- 
ness fell upon the lake, the call of the 
fishermen, at their night-toil. The 
crowd dispersed. The world received 
its own again. With the darkness 
came forgetfulness, leaving but a faint 
memory of the Voice or of its teach- 
ings, as of a wind whispering among 
the fickle reeds. The enthusiasm of 
the throng, like the last rays of the 
sun, died out ; and their hearts, like 
the sea, again sent incessant desi-res 
murmuring and complaining to the 
shore. 



XXII. GOD 



1 107. God is Love. — No man can 

understand God by the intellect ; no 
man can understand God by any 
ratiocinative process. But he that is 
filled with the afiflatus of love knows 
and feels God, just as a man knows 
when it is summer without looking in 
the almanac. 

1108. God's Children. — We are be- 
ginners — babes ; but Thy heart is as 
a mother's, and, whatever else in the 
household may be forgotten, never 
the child ! 

1 109. Limitations of Comprehen- 
sion. — One of the most significant 
experiments that ever I saw was one 



that was performed by Professor Tyn- 
dall in New York, when he analyzed 
by the spectrum a beam of light. He 
showed distinctly all the different ele- 
ments that existed in white light, 
" and then," he said, " at this end of 
the spectrum there is another quality, 
but it is a quality for which we have no 
sense. It is a fact, but you can neither 
see it, nor smell it, nor taste it, nor feel 
it, nor hear it. It is there, but we have 
no sense to discern it." And he dem- 
onstrated that it was there, by certain 
chemical effects. It was produced, 
and we saw it was an active power 
existing at that point of the spectrum ; 



240 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



but we stood outside of it, simply be- 
cause we were not given to under- 
stand its physical quality. And how 
many other things are there all around 
about us that exist and are necessary 
in the universe that we never know 
anything about! So in the Divine 
nature, how many principles, how 
many points, how many emotions, 
how many beauties there must be, 
and we not discern them simply be- 
cause we are so small and deficient 
in organization ! 

1 1 10. Search for Divine Wisdom. — 
Tell men that a new lode has been 
found in some gulch or cannon, tell 
men that some Black Hills country is 
open for the digging of more gold ; 
and all the armies cannot keep the 
emigrants from streaming thither from 
every quarter through the plains. 
Suffering from weariness and from 
hunger, and in the face of a thousand 
scalping dangers they will hunt for 
that gold. Tell men that in the 
mountains there are precious stones — 
opals, rubies, sapphires and the like 
— and how they will explore and ex- 
plode the hills for them ! And though 
but one in a thousand can gain them, 
yet each one of the thousand will 
think that he is to be the favored one. 

Now, we are told in the Word of 
God that this understanding of him is 
more precious than rubies ; that silver 
and gold are as nothing to it ; and 
that we are to search for God, to seek 
after him, as for hid treasures — as 
men search for the dearest objects of 
their desires. 

mi. Power of God's Spirit. — Our 
thoughts cannot find the way. Thou 
art too vast. Thou art diffused in 
such ways that we cannot by search- 
ing find thee out. Thou must seek 
us. Thou must fall upon the soul 
with the daylight and the warmth of 
thine own nature. Thou that art the 



light of the world. Grant that we 
may to-day respond to the in-shining 
of the Spirit ; that we may feel our- 
selves drawn up. Even as the sea 
itself rises and dwells in the pure air 
above by the shining of the sun, de- 
scending again to enrich all the earth, 
so may we be drawn up in thought 
and in affection, and purified in the 
ether of thy presence, to descend 
again unto the work of life, and bear 
the faith and the certainty of thy life 
and thy nature to all about us. 

1 1 12. Agnosticism. — It is of no 
use to say that a man must be a fool 
who does not believe in a God. I tell 
you that the question is a profound 
one. I have both sympathy and 
respect for any honest man whose 
mind labors on that question. When 
men say that you cannot prove the 
existence of God by science, I say, 
"Amen," and only subjoin that it 
never was pretended, either by 
prophet, by seer, by apostle, by the 
Saviour, or in the Word of God, any- 
where, that it could be proved in that 
way. God is spirit ; science deals 
with matter. You cannot demon- 
strate the existence of matter, or even 
the fruit of organized matter in 
human constructions. Who would 
ever undertake to demonstrate the 
quality of one of Raphael's pictures 
by any scientific process, or in any 
court except the court of a man's ap- 
preciation ? The evidence of thought 
is before the tribunal of thought. The 
evidence of quality is in the presence 
of the tribunal of quality. A man 
standing before a magnificent scene, 
and not seeing anything in it, is not a 
judge of the man that stands before 
the scene and is thrilled in every 
faculty of his nature by it. 

1 1 13. Ideals of God. — When men 
worshiped leeks and onions, and 
monkeys, and sticks, and atones, it 



GOD 



241 



was necessary to carry up the con- 
ception of the Divine nature, away 
from these lower images and repre- 
sentations. All men must form their 
ideal of God out of something that is 
in themselves ; and the heathen 
naturally form theirs out of their own 
lower passions and bodily appetites 
and desires. The Greeks formed theirs 
largely from their esthetical feelings. 
Our Christian method of forming an 
ideal of God is to take our highest 
and most purified affections, and our 
noblest moral sentiments, and conceive 
of the Divine nature through them. 

1114. In the Image of God. — If 
God is unknowable, then to all 
practical intents he does not exist. 
That view is practical Atheism. As 
to loving a God that is incon- 
ceivable, unthinkable, unknowable, 
— it is preposterous. A morning- 
glory wants something that is solid 
to run up on. It wants to twine ; 
but it will not twine on a shadow. 
Human nature, too, must have 
something substantial to twine on. 
And if you proclaim an imma- 
nent divinity, a kind of Soul-of-the 
World, that has reason, though not 
anything that we understand by rea- 
son ; that has justice, though not any- 
thing that we understand by justice ; 
and that has goodness, though not 
anything that we understand by good- 
ness, you will surely throw men into 
hopeless confusion ! It must be as- 
sumed that men's essential moral 
faculties and intellectual structure 
constitute a just foundation for a com- 
parison with the ideas which they 
form of God. The difference is not 
in quality, but in degree or extent. 
No man would hold a candle out of 
the window and say that it was sun- 
rise ; nevertheless, the fire in the 
candle and the fire in the sun are the 
same in their essential nature, though 



they are not the same in magnitude, 
or in power of heat or illumination. 

1 1 15. The Philosopher's God not 
Adorable. — I cannot say my prayers 
to the Omnipotent, Omniscient, 
Omnipresent, any more than I could 
to a proposition in Euclid. You 
might as well tell me that three 
angles make a triangle, "Now wor- 
ship! " Tell me that God is the sun 
of justice ; that he is the supreme 
legislator ; that he is the omnipotent 
dispenser of the universe, and it is 
certainly something tome, philosophic- 
ally, intellectually ; but human na- 
ture is not generally philosophical, 
and only a small proportion of men 
are competent to philosophize. 

1 1 1 6. A Personal God Fundamental. 
— I can conceive of a clouded God ; I 
can conceive of a universality of 
wisdom and of power that has no 
cohesion, or that is a kind of floating 
atmosphere throughout the universe ; 
I can conceive of a semi-physical 
Essence, as it were ; I can conceive 
of an all-pervading Influence : but I 
cannot conceive of any person's 
taking comfort in it. I can conceive 
of a man's deriving pleasure, if he is 
a poet, from looking at a rose-tinted 
cloud on the horizon at evening ; but 
I cannot conceive of a man's loving a 
being that is no more to him than 
such a cloud. A personal God is, I 
think, the very foundation of piety. 

1 1 17. Hunger and Thirst for God. 
— I love knowledge ; I rejoice to 
know how God packed the trunk of 
this world, and what things he put 
into it for its journey through time ; I 
love to study the heavens that declare 
the glory of God, and the earth that 
shows his handiwork, everywhere and 
always ; but an acquaintance with 
these things is not enough. I admire 
the majesty of the cathedral and the 
sanctity of the church, and the holi- 



242 



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ncss of the altar, and the prayers and 
praises of the worshiping assembly ; 
but these are not enough. My soul 
hungers and thirsts for God. 

1 1 18. Emptiness of Pantheism. — I 
believe in God, and never for a mo- 
ment have faltered in believing in a 
personal God, as distinguished from a 
Pantheistic God, whether it is the 
coarser Pantheism of materialism, be- 
lieving that the material universe is 
God, or the more subtle view of Mat- 
thew Arnold, who holds that God is 
nothing but a tendency in the uni- 
verse — a something that is not me 
that tends towards righteousness. 
Well, I would rather chew thistle- 
down all summer long than to work 
with any such idea as that. 

1 1 19. Distorted View^s of God. — 
Have you ever seen the concave mir- 
rors which are put up in curiosity 
shops? A man thinks himself small 
and handsome, till he stands before 
one of those mirrors, when he sees 
his face and body and legs very much 
perverted as to length and breadth ; 
but the fault is not in him : it is in the 
glass. And look at the grotesque 
conceptions which are thrown out be- 
fore the community as representing 
God. They are hideous caricatures, 
springing from men's lowest animalism 
and most depraved qualities. 

1 120. Human Judgments of God. — 
Suppose an ant looks upon a moun- 
tain, if he ever does, and learns, if he 
ever can learn, that it required two 
thousand years to build that moun- 
tain? " Two thousand years ! Well, 
why didn't he build it as quickly as I 
build my hill ? I can build it in a 
night. What is the meaning of this 
long delay in building a mountain? 
Tell me there is a God ! If there 
is he ought to do just as the ant 
does." That is like men, judging 
of the Divine processes in life by 



a too close analogy with their own 
way. 

1 1 21. Conceptions of God. — In the 
Grecian age, at the time when theol- 
ogy was in the hand of the Greek, it 
worked towards an intellectual philos- 
ophy. In the Roman age theology 
worked towards the forming of insti- 
tutions and laws ; external, earthy. 
In the Mediaeval period it worked to- 
wards superstition, in carrying out the 
behests of the Romish government 
and theology. In our day the world 
is democratized. Kings are sub- 
verted, peoples are lifted up. Privi- 
leges are taken away from the few, 
and things are given to the many. 
The questions of this age are questions 
of sympathy, of humanity, of equity, 
of the rights of men. The whole 
world is fermenting and carrying on 
and up the great questions of human 
life, of human duty, of the masses and 
of mankind at large. 

Now it is impossible that these con- 
ceptions, the fruit of many ages, but 
which have had a particular develop- 
ment and expansion in our time, should 
not act upon the imagination and the 
thought of Christian men as respects 
the nature of God. They have been 
so acting. They have been taking 
the frown from the brow of Jehovah, 
they have been kindling the light of 
love in the eyes of God, they have 
been taking away the hard, stern lips 
of vengeance and putting the lips of 
tenderness in their place. They are 
changing the popular conception of 
God, bringing it back to the Christian 
and the primitive idea, — the vision of 
Moses, the ideal presented by Jesus — 
that God's nature is primarily good- 
ness, and alternatively only is it terri- 
ble and full of fear. 

1 122. Divine Democracy. — God is 
the greatest democrat in the universe. 
He does not regard ranks, nor condi- 



GOD 



243 



tions, nor degrees ; and he says that 
the highest rich man is just like the 
lowest poor man, and that a king is 
no better than the humblest of his 
subjects. As you go towards heaven, 
you approach true divine democracy. 

1 1 23 . Varying Conceptions of Deity. 
— One stands in Milan Cathedral, 
under the nave, and looks up into 
those mysterious depths, until it seems 
as though he would exhale and fly 
into space. There, in the brooding 
darkness, the feeling of reverence 
weighs upon his very soul. And the 
Milan Cathedral to him is that which 
it seems to be when the low-lying sun 
has shot through the window and 
kindled the whole interior. 

At the very same moment there 
stands upon the roof another man, and 
about him are those three thousand 
statues, carved and standing in their 
several niches and pinnacles ; every- 
thing looks like the bristhng frost- 
work in a forest of icicles ; and far 
above and far on every side swell the 
lines of beauty. How different is his 
conception from that of the man who 
stands in the nave below ! 

But, at the same time, a man stands 
outside looking at the cathedral's 
fretted front and its wondrous beauty 
and diversity, while a fellow-compan- 
ion and traveler is on one side look- 
ing also at the exterior. 

Here are four men — one before the 
structure, one beside it, one on the 
roof, and one in the interior ; and 
each of them, as he gives his account 
of the Milan Cathedral, speaks of that 
which made the strongest impression 
upon his mind. But it takes the con- 
current report of these four men to 
represent that vast work of architecture. 

Is it so with a man-built cathedral, 
and shall it not be so with the mighty 
God who is from eternity to eternity ? 
Is there any man who " by searching 



can find out God? Canst thou find 
out the Almighty unto perfection?" 
Each man has that conception of God 
which he is capable of receiving ; this 
is added to the common stock. And 
it is these concurrent differences, 
these harmonious separations, that 
make the symphony of knowledge. 
We do not want unison ; we want 
harmony. 

1 1 24. Seeing God. — "Blessed are 
the pure in heart ; they shall see God." 
We fix the telescope and look through 
it with a glass that shows the great- 
ness of riches and of power which 
men have ambition for. Then we lift 
it to the orb eternal and there is noth- 
ing but a blur. We try then the glass 
of intellect with the majesty of ideas 
and the interpreting power of philoso- 
phy ; but there is no God beyond, that 
it interprets to us. We take the 
purity of heart, the tenderness of love, 
the sweetness of the divine element in 
man ; through that we look towards 
God, and instantly there springs up 
before us a conception, heaven-filling, 
of the glorious orb, transcendent be- 
yond our calculations, with majesty of 
beauty and strangely mingling colors. 
We begin to say : "O, my God, I 
have heard of thee with the hearing 
of the ear, but now mine eyes see 
thee ; I humble myself in the dust! " 
No man can form any true conception 
of God, unless he is Godlike. 

1 125. The Development-Idea. — The 
new view which the evolutionary doc- 
trine compels must be the entire and 
thorough upsetting of the old views of 
original sin, man's natural sinfulness, 
and so on — which arose from a literal 
interpretation of Pauhne figures. The 
fa?miy is the unitary idea of human- 
ity, not a subject-race under a mon- 
arch. And the moment you change 
the fundamental idea of man's char- 
acter — from fall to growth, and God's 



244 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



chaniclcr — from force to love, you 
change the entire direction of the mo- 
tive and the result of human life. 
The growth of the human soul upward 
is the direct effect of the influence of 
God upon it, like sunlight on a plant. 

1 126. The Clay and the Potter. — 
The clay is stupid, and does not know 
enough to ask the potter how he is 
forming it, and why he is forming it 
thus ; but if it were intelligent enough 
it would have a right to do this. The 
commentators, however, miss this 
point. They seem to think that the 
potter has a right over the clay, and 
that that is the whole of it ; but the 
fact is, the clay has no attributes of 
intelligence, so there is nothing in it to 
question the potter ; while if it knew 
anything it might ask the potter many 
questions. 

1 1 27. Origin of Evil. — Men wonder 
at the origin of evil. It originated 
with God. You might as well look at 
a steam engine, and say, " What 
could have been the origin of this vast 
machine?" Why, the engineer's 
brain was. If God had meant men 
to be varnished and polished, like the 
vase for the shelf, he would have 
made them so. But he made them in 
germs and seed-forms, and said to 
them, "Grow ! " And growing means 
labor-pain ; you cannot get rid of it. 
It is a part of the condition of organ- 
ized creation, that the work of going 
from a lower to a higher state is like a 
new-birth, with cries and pains both 
ways, to those that help, and those 
that are born. 

1128. Larger Evidence of Design. — 
You are all familiar with the famous 
illustration of Dr. Paley, where a man 
finds a watch, and infers irresistibly 
that that watch was made by some 
skillful, thoughtful watchmaker. If 
it be an argument of design that a 
man could make one watch, is it not a 



sublimer argument of design that there 
is a man existing who could create a 
manufactory turning out millions of 
watches, and by machinery too, so 
that the human hand has little to do 
but to adjust the parts already created 
by machines ? If it be evidence of 
design in creation that God adapted 
one single flower to its place and func- 
tions, is it not greater evidence if there 
is a system of such adaptations going 
on from eternity to eternity ? 

1 1 29. The Immanent God. — How 
God infuses himself into mind or mat- 
ter no one knows. It is somewhat a 
parallel, although by a small measure 

•of comparison, with that which every 
man is conscious of in his own ex- 
perience. . . . Can anybody tell 
what the connection is between the 
mind-operation and the brain, or any 
of the organs of the whole human 
body ? We know that we have a 
physical body subject to great phys- 
ical laws ; and we know that, pervad- 
ing it somehow, somewhere, there is 
also something that is not matter, and 
that is the most effectual and charac- 
teristic element in us. That which we 
recognize in ourselves has only to be 
enlarged to become an analogy of 
that which is grander ; and to give us 
some vague idea of the connection 
that subsists between the developed 
universe and the ever-presence of the 
divine Intelligence and Will. 

1 130. Infinity, Incomprehensible. — 
When Columbus drew near to the 
eastern coast of this western continent 
he could see that there were moun- 
tains, but do you beheve he knew 
what minerals were in them ? Do you 
suppose he knew all the trees, all the 
shrubs, all the vines, all the herbs 
there? He knew something about the 
outlying islands of this great continent, ' 
but he did not understand the details 
that went to make it up. I can un- 



GOD 



245 



derstand that there should be such a 
being as God, but when it is said that 
he is infinite, I am so finite that I 
break right down there. I cannot un- 
derstand infiniteness. 

1 13 1. Beneficence of God. — Nature 
says, "Take care of yourself." Grace 
says, " Take care of yourself that you 
may take care of others." Nature 
says, " Eat because you love food ; 
clothe yourself because you like cloth- 
ing ; make yourself comfortable be- 
cause it is so much pleasanter to be 
comfortable than not to be." What 
does motherhood say? "No matter 
about me : take care of my babe. I 
will eat though I loathe food, because 
my babe must have nourishment. 
All that I am at present I am for the 
sake of this httle helpless thing." It 
is the total turning of life into a be- 
neficence. Give to this conception 
infinity, give to it unlimited knowledge 
and power, give to it all divine attri- 
butes, and call it God, and you have 
the nearest conception that you can 
have of that great Spirit of excellence 
and might, conferring life and happi- 
ness upon all things beneath him. 

1 132. Partial Views. — If I am lost 
in a forest, and have waited all night 
long to learn the points of the com- 
pass, I do not stop when morning 
comes to get a full view of the sun. 
As soon as I see a growing brightness 
in the east, I say to myself, " Now I 
know my direction ; for that is east, 
and that is west, and that is north, 
and that is south." There are thou- 
sands of intimations that we get, 
which, although we cannot fully un- 
derstand them, are plainly designed 
of God to point out our way in this 
world ; and that is enough. 

1 1 33. God's Government. — God is 
not a mild, moonshiny, indifferent 
lover of men, who sails idly through 
time and through eternity because he 



is so careless about right and wrong 
that it does not make much difference 
whether folks do right or wrong. Not 
that ! If there is anything that is 
clearly declared in the Bible, it is the 
intensity of God's feeling on the sub- 
ject of rectitude. Right and wrong 
are the two pillars of the whole moral 
government of God. 

1 1 34. A Lovable God. — I should 
like to behold icebergs, but I should 
not like to sleep under them or near 
them. I should like to look at them 
as marvels of beauty, but it is not 
where they are that I should choose to 
have my home. And there may be 
lifted up a conception of God so mass- 
ive, so grand, and so remote from 
human sympathy, that, though we may 
admire it, we cannot love it. What 
we need is a God that, while we admire, 
we shall love, with all the mind, and 
heart, and soul, and strength. 

1135. The Comforting God. — How, 
when the child in the night screams 
with terror, hearing sounds that he 
knows not of, is that child comforted 
and put to rest ? Is it by a philosoph- 
ical explanation that the sounds were 
made by the rats in the partition? 
No ; it is by the mother taking the 
child in her lap, and singing sweetly 
to it, and rocking it. And the child 
thinks nothing of the explanation, but 
only of the mother. 

Now, it pleases God to take in his 
arms and bosom those that love him 
and put their trust in him. 

1 136. A Personal Right to God. — 
Do you wander abroad in foreign 
lands? Are you solitary among 
crowds? Are you weary of seeing 
endless faces that have no history for 
you and touch no string in your na- 
ture, and do you at last come upon a 
countryman speaking your language, 
your sweet mother tongue, whom you 
distinguish by ear before you can see 



246 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



him, and do you cry out, " Our coun- 
tryman ! our countryman"? How 
much is there in that our, which ap- 
propriates ! How much pride and 
alTection is blended with the appro- 
priation when we say, " Our circle, 
our family, our companion, otir 
friends, our c\v\A ! " How many cir- 
cuits of love does this word take ! 
And how vast is the meaning when 
the soul, looking upon God, clasps 
him with this embrace, and is able to 
say, "My Father"; or when men 
standing as a congregation of Chris- 
tians are able to say " Our Father ! " 

1 1 3 7 . Growth in Knowledge of God. 
— Suppose my little ten-year-old 
daughter, sitting in thoughtfulness, 
should look up ingenuously, and say, 
" Mamma, won't you tell me how you 
felt when you were in love with papa ? " 
The mother would smile benevolently, 
but if she spoke the truth she would 
say, " My dear child, wait a few years 
and you won't need an explanation of 
that : you will know it when you come 
to it, and you never can know it until 
you do," That child knows some- 
thing about mother — enough to make 
herself happy ; something about father 
— enough to make her think him the 
greatest man in the world. But, after 
all, does not all that is largest and 
best in them lie outside of the child's 
recognition, and does it not wait for 
the child's development — for the 
child's reproduction in itself of some- 
thing which shall be equivalent to it, 
or a type or image of it ? 

1138. Realization of God. — Our 
friends when far from us are all 
ghosts ; not miserable midnight ap- 
paritions, but invisible spirits made up 
of that in them which is most subtle, 
and by us cherished, because least 
allied to fleshly qualities ; and there 
can be no more question that the vi- 
sion of our God can become tangible, 



not to our hands, but to our thought, 
than that we can carry our friends in 
spirit-embrace. 

1139. God's Nature not Self- 
Centered. — While I never could bow 
down before a crystalline God seated 
on a marble throne, white and cold as 
the marble itself, that suns himself 
and bids the revolving stars sweep on, 
every one of their censers casting out 
incense for his supreme and royal 
delectation ; when I look up and be- 
hold the throne blazing with that 
whose sparks made mother-love in the 
world, and when I behold sitting 
upon that throne, One who cares and 
loves and longs, and through infinite 
ages with infinite patience, waits for 
the unfolding of the low, bringing 
them up in sections and ages higher 
and higher until the world shall blos- 
som and the consummation of the 
millennial day be at hand, I cannot 
withhold adoration, and I join with 
those that cry out "Thou art worthy 
to reign." Love, always ; love, uni- 
versal ; to that I can and I do bow my 
understanding, my heart and my con- 
science. 

1 1 40. God's Love for His Children. 
— It is said that some birds pluck 
feathers from their breasts to make 
nests for their young. Some fathers 
and mothers, as it were, pluck feathers 
from inside their breasts to soften the 
beds of their children. They bring 
them up, httle by little, from childhood 
to manhood and womanhood, making 
sacrifices for them all the while. Now, 
when we are taught to say, " Our 
Father," to God, do we mean any 
less than when we speak of an earthly 
father? Shall a father on earth be 
described as venerable and lovely, 
and shall the Father in heaven be 
depicted as a Nero? Shall mother- 
hood on earth be employed to repre- 
sent all that is beatific and gentle and 



GOD 



247 



beautiful, and shall we adopt a the- 
ology that points to the nourishing 
God as one that is harsh, cruel, and 
repugnant, turning the universe like a 
vast mill-wheel that, as it revolves, 
crushes all that comes in its way ? 

1 141. The Living God: Person- 
ality. — A living being, God is revealed 
to human consciousness not by intel- 
lectual steps, pure and simple, though 
these are on the way to help, but by 
the perception of quahties in him in 
living forms. That is to say, if you 
analyze a man so that his qualities are 
separated from each other, and you 
present him not by synthesis as he is 
in the actual state of life, but as he is 
analyzed into certain elements, you 
have before your mmd a conception, 
comparatively speaking, void of all 
moral power. It is the living soul 
that takes hold upon living souls, and 
not an intellectual analysis or account 
of it. I do not object to any man's 
analyzing fruit. I should object, how- 
ever, to having all the results put in 
separate saucers, and to eating the 
lignin, the sugar, the fibrin, the gela- 
tine and everything else, and then 
wiping my mouth, and saying that I 
had eaten a peach. It is the peach as 
it is organized in life that is sweet and 
fragrant. 

1 142. Man's Access to God. — We 
thank Thee, our Father, that there is a 
way of our thought ; that we climb no 
ladder let down from the sky ; that 
we go up no ascending, wearying step 
to the light of thy glory. We thank 
Thee that the way is so easy that a 
child may move therein. We do not 
run nor strive with mighty endeavor 
to find Thee. We are floated into thy 
presence. We are lifted up as on 
angels' wings. We say, Our Father, 
and behold the whole heaven is 
opened before us, and all the be- 
nignity, wisdom and power of God, 



and the great love of God shine out 
of that word ; and we are drawn up 
into thy presence or ever we are 
aware that we are surrounded with 
God, in whom we live and move and 
have our being ; and so we change 
worlds at our own wish and will. 

1143. A God of Law. — It would be 
an abomination for parents to care 
more for the regimen of the household 
than for the welfare of the children, 
and if anything were to be sacrificed, 
sacrifice the children. But men have 
said God could not do this, he had to 
take care of his Law; God could not 
do that, for he had to maintain the 
system of Law. God to them was a 
Being quibbling about laws, like a 
captious judge in his constructions of 
superficial laws on a superficial bench. 
That reigns ; that reigns yet : and it 
is the reign of folly. 

1 1 44. Governmental View of God. 
— I hold that you are, by representing 
God as a governor instead of a father, 
embarrassing and not helping men in 
their endeavors to become Christians. 
It is said that these views make 
stronger Christians. Yes, very much 
as among Indians children are made 
strong by killing the weak ones, and 
leaving only those that are so tough 
that nothing can kill them ! If it is 
right to destroy twenty men to get one 
strong Christian, then these methods 
are right ; but if I understand the 
spirit of the Gospel, it was sent to the 
weak. 

1 1 45. Divine Benevolence. — God 
does not confer gifts upon men be- 
cause they deserve them, or have 
earned them. He confers them be- 
cause the fullness of his own nature 
needs expression. Can we understand 
this? Yes. We see it in Hfe. 

There is in some natures such a 
large organized tendency to music 
that they develop music, not because 



248 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



some one asks them to, not because 
if they do it may give them fame or 
reputation ; but because it is there, 
and demands expression. It does not 
need outward sohcitation. They think 
music ; they sing. There are others 
through whose whole lives there is a 
tinge of poetic color in almost every 
thought ; and at times there will be 
hours of rapture. They cannot help 
it. They see visions, and they dream 
dreams ; and their thoughts flow mu- 
sically, and almost in numbers. 

This is what we call inspiration, or 
genius. It is a certain fullness of na- 
ture that leads action to be from within 
outward. It is the highest conception 
among men. And it points to the 
same conception of the Divine nature. 

1 146. Love's Power. — Whatever is 
needful comes to love. It is not a 
mere vapid state of good nature and 
indifference, or of good will springing 
from indifference. Love is girded 
about with all strength, and carries 
in its hand both the sword and the 
wreath ; it is able to slay that it may 
make alive, and to give pain to men 
that it may raise them to higher joy. 

1 147, Thoughts of God. — We un- 
derstand of God only so much as we 
have the germs of in ourselves, I 
have in my hand a sprinkling of the 
ocean, that is enough to tell me what 
water is ; but one drop won't tell me 
how much water there is on the whole 
globe. Human experiences will give 
some insight into what love means, 
and justice, and patience means, and 
long-suffering ; but how can they in- 
terpret the God of all the ages, that 
has been unfolding the human family 
through all its stages of savage life, 
barbaric life, semi-civilized hfe, and 
every conceivable combination of hu- 
man experience ? Who among us is 
big enough to take in the infinitude of 
the Eternal ? 



1 148. Cosmic Center of Peace. — It 
is said that in the very center of those 
great cyclones at sea, there is a circle 
of peace ; a ruinous sweep, outside, 
and in the center, peace. In this 
stormy world there is a great center 
of peace, and there sits God. 

1 149. God's Outflaming Life. — It 
cannot be tolerated that God should 
make that a sovereign virtue in him- 
self which is denounced as the essence 
of sin in his creatures. The worship 
of one's self is not made amiable be- 
cause one is a king. A benevolent 
being is centrifugal and not centrip- 
etal. God lives for his universe and 
not for himself. His thought and 
purposes go forth and travel outward 
evermore. 

1 150. Christ's Representation of 
Jehovah. — No carved stone, no ivory 
and gold, have ever sought to express 
the majesty of Jehovah. These things 
were good enough for Jupiter ; they 
were unfit for Jehovah. From the 
beginning, the Hebrew mind could 
find nothing on earth — not even in the 
framework of the globe itself — to rep- 
resent their conception of Jehovah. 
The morning light was but the golden 
fringe of his garments. His slightest 
look they called lightning. His lowest 
tones were sonorous bolts of resound- 
ing storms. And when the mightiest 
rendings of nature were ended, there 
came forth a prompting voice, saying, 
" These are parts of his ways, but the 
thunder of his power who can under- 
stand ? " 

God is a spirit. Mortal eye cannot 
behold him. Were God to appear 
corporeally, it could not be God, but 
only a representative form. He is to 
be known spiritually ; that is, by 
thought and by feeling — not by eye- 
sight, but by insight of heart. In this 
manner Christ drew back the veil 
from Jehovah, and disclosed this God 



GOD 



249 



of love ! He revealed love as the se- 
cret of God's wisdom, the end of his 
thought, the genius of his disposition. 

1 151. God in Christ. — This attempt- 
ing to theologize on God and his mani- 
festation in Jesus is but the meagerest 
and poorest way of getting at him. 
The theory — any theory — of that prob- 
lem never made a man a Christian 
yet ; but the simple statement that 
God so loved the world that he sent 
his own Son to die for it — that is in- 
telligible to the heart of man and ap- 
peals to his sympathy. It is at once a 
force, a motive. The attempt to com- 
mute a moral impulse into an intel- 
lectual idea is about like changing 
grapes into wine. The wine is un- 
doubtedly good for some purposes, 
but it isn't grapes, — the form is 
changed, and it becomes an entirely 
different thing. 

1152. The Grace of God. — What is 
grace ? The benignity of parental 
love. That is the ground on which 
God saves men. There never was 
anything done on the face of the 
earth that gave a man the right to 
say, " I claim salvation." The true 
attitude of the soul towards God is ex- 
pressed by him who says, " I trust in 
Thee." And the heart of God is such 
that sooner would the mother hold 
back her bosom from her suckling 
than he would withdraw his love from 
the most imperfect of his creatures. 
When we go to heaven we shall go 
through the door of what God is, and 
not through the door of what we are. 

1 153. God to be Spiritually Appre- 
hended. — Stop the ears and play a 
beautiful tune before the eyes. A 
man says, "There is a tune going 
through the air all the time ; I wish I 
could see it." But can a man see a 
sound ? Can the eye accept evidence 
that is addressed to the ear ? Or vice 
versa; apply to the ear a picture. 



Can a man take in at the ear that 
which addresses itself to the eye ? 

Now, God is not amenable to the 
evidence that lies in the eye that sees, 
or the ear that hears, or the hand that 
touches. Nothing spiritual can be ap- 
prehended by any laws which come 
down to the horizon of finiteness and 
the flesh. 

1 154. God Conceived through 
Man's Best Qualities. — A man who is 
absolutely without a musical instinct 
can form no conception of a musician. 
A man who is absolutely without cour- 
age can form no conception of a hero. 
A man who is absolutely without 
avarice cannot tell how a miser feels. 
A man who is without any sense of 
honor or truth cannot conceive how 
an honorable man feels. You judge 
of the nature of God from the best 
things that are in you. The fault of 
heathenism is, that men, not being de- 
veloped spiritually, build God out of 
their fleshly nature, and so build idols. 
If men, a little more developed, have 
no higher elements within them from 
which to build, they can build only 
from their lower passions ; and so they 
have fiendish, warlike gods. And as 
men grow more and more noble, and 
become developed in their higher 
spiritual nature, they build with right 
materials, and begin to touch right 
conceptions of God. 

1 1 55. Divine Conceptions from 
Earthly Experiences. — As when the 
sun would make pictures in the heav- 
ens, it draws moisture from every 
brook, and every river, and every 
lake, and from the sea itself, to form 
clouds, and then, striking its rays 
through them, paints the morning and 
evening glory, so man, when he would 
make heavenly pictures, gathers the 
primal elements, the first experiences, 
the throbbings through which the Di- 
vine mind shines with varied color. 



ISO 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



Earthly knowledges are the founda- 
tions on which men build their notions 
of heavenly things. If brought up 
without intercourse with society, you 
are by the same conditions cut off from 
the possibility of fashioning a God, 
personal, near, real, and a present 
help in time of trouble. 

1 156. Morality — Human and Di- 
vine. — If it be taught that God sits in 
heaven, and is the joyful recipient of 
infinite flatteries on every side (though 
it is very wicked for us to be flattered), 
what are you going to do with the his- 
tory of Nebuchadnezzar, who one 
morning looked out on Babylon, and 
said, " Is not this great Babylon that 
I have builded for the house of my 
kingdom, by the might of my power, 
and for the honor of my majesty .'' " 
and who, because he towered up in 
that arrogant self-consciousness, was 
smitten down and sent to grass ? 
Shall we be taught that, after hurling 
his bolt of judgment upon that proud 
Oriental monarch for his arrogance, 
God may stand and look over the 
battlements of heaven, and say, " Is 
not this great Jerusalem that I have 
builded for my honor and power, and 
for the glory of my name," and that 
this is perfectly right in the New Jeru- 
salem, though it was detestable in the 
old, or in the neighboring cities of it? 
There must be congruity of represen- 
tations, or the mind can never say, 
" Thy will be done." 

1 157. Atoning Love. — What is the 
atonement? That Christ gave God 
the right to be compassionate ? That 
he came down to this world, and 
made a bargain, and agreed that he 
would suffer so much if God after- 
wards would exercise compassion and 
leniency towards men ? Away with 
your shop logic ! Away with your 
commercial theories ! Go down 
among the moles and bats, and grope 



with such detestable notions of truth 
as that by agreement Christ came 
among men to suffer and give God a 
chance to be gracious ! Over all 
these heresies of hell I lift up the glo- 
rious words, " God so /oved the world 
that Ae gave his Son." Love before 
Christ came was the bow which sent 
that silver arrow into the world. 

1 158. Joy Over the Lost One, 
Found. — An old pioneer once at- 
tempted to tell me of a circumstance 
which took place in Indiana during 
its early settlement. There lived on 
the verge of civilization a poor family 
that had two children. One was too 
small to get out of the house, and the 
other, four or five years old, wandered 
away and got into the woods. The 
alarm was given, and the few settlers 
in that region were summoned. The 
search was continued till evening ; 
and they were out with torches all 
night, and pretty much all the next 
day, and into the night following ; 
and I think it was on the morning of 
the third day that this man came 
across the httle fellow, in a kind of 
thicket, very much exhausted. And 
he described to me the triumph with 
which he seized that little child, and 
took a bee-line for home. He said 
some of the neighbors who had got 
home saw him coming, and shouted : 
and that the mother heard the cry. 
And I never knew what happened 
then ; for the old fellow could not tell 
it. He stammered, and choked, and 
tried to tell how the mother received 
him when he brought back the lost 
child ; but he broke down in the at- 
tempt. I have thought of it a thou- 
sand times since. 

Now, if when you bring back to a 
mother or father a lost child that they 
love so poorly and imperfectly, and 
the expressions of delight and grati- 
tude which you receive are such as to 



GOD 



251 



overpower you, what will it be when 
you take one of God's lost children 
that you have pursued in the wilder- 
ness, and, after much labor and fa- 
tigue, have at last found, and carry it 
and present it to him ? 

1 159. Seeing God as He is. — If 
sleeping, some night, the archaeologist 
or photographer, who had been labor- 
ing among the ruins of the Acropolis, 
and who had become deeply interested 
in his work, should see rising above 
him in the light of the moon the Par- 
thenon, perfect, as it was in the palmy 
days of Athens, without a flaw, every 
line true, every part symmetrical, 
beautiful beyond description, that 
would be glorious in a small way ; 
but oh ! how poor a simile that is of 
the transformation which awaits our 
vision when we shall go hence ! Here 
we have been picking up fragmentary 
ideas of God, distorted, ill-mated, ex- 
aggerated in one way, and shrunk un- 
duly in another ; and we have hardly 
been able to put them together, such 
is the low state of human society and 
human character in this world ; but 
what will our conception of him be 
when we shall see him as he is ! 

1 1 60. Problems of Providence. — 
When the child asks strange and curi- 
ous questions of the parent, the parent 
turns in his mind how he can answer, 
and says, " You cannot understand 
it, my child ; by and by when you 
grow up I will tell you, and then you 
can understand it all." Nor is it ar- 
rogant in the parent. He cannot 
make the matter plain to the child, 
but he remembers he was a child, and 
he can understand and judge the child 
while the child cannot judge him. 

1 1 61. The Heavenly Father. — I 
sometimes think of man as of a child 
sitting in a boat. The child does not 
know the coast, and it very little un- 
derstands how to row. If the child 



were to be left to itself, pulling upon 
the oars, its right hand being a little 
stronger than the other, it would be 
all the time veering the boat to the 
right, and the boat would be con- 
stantly turning round and round. 
The child would perhaps make its 
way out of the harbor and into the 
ocean, and it would be carried away 
and lost, if there were no guiding 
power in the boat except its own. 
But there in the stern sits the father. 
The uneven strokes of the child would 
carry the boat this way or that way 
out of its course ; but the steady hand 
of the father overcomes those uneven 
strokes ; and all the mistakes with the 
oars are rectified by the rudder, and 
the boat keeps the right course. So 
that the force exerted by the child, 
though misdirected, all works for good 
when the father guides. 

Now, we have an overseeing, super- 
vising Father, a divine Spirit ; and, 
in the struggle of life, if we pull 
wrong, or pull disproportionately, do- 
ing what we do by mistake, there is 
this directing Spirit that guides, in- 
spires, overrules results, and brings to 
pass glorious ends by means of igno- 
minious instruments. 

1 162. Superficial Judgments. — 
There are men without any belief in 
the overruling providence of God. 
They judge of things simply by the 
surface. They are men who, if they 
had just come to America, and found 
a chestnut-tree, and seen the burrs, 
could not be convinced that chestnuts 
were good for anything, and would 
say, " Who would eat such prickly 
things as those ? ' ' But when the frost 
touches the burr, it opens a case with 
a satin hning as fine as that of any 
lady's dressing-case, and discloses a 
little nut that has been swelling and 
ripening for many a day ; and I never 
saw a man that would not eat the 



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RELIGIOUS LIFE 



chestnut when it was out of the 
burr. 

1 1 63. Providence in Nature. — When 
I went to Lowell once, I thought it a 
shame that the looms which I saw 
there were not allowed to vote ! I 
think they would vote more wisely 
than many men do ! They seemed to 
have intelligence and skill and voli- 
tion. They seemed to have memory 
and foresight. Man has put into them 
those qualities of his own to a certain 
extent. Now, do not you believe that 
there is a providence in the loom by 
which threads of all colors will find 
their place in the fabric ? Is there any 
chance in it? All the wheels are of 
iron, and the threads as they go in 
amongst them are in apparent con- 
fusion ; and yet every one of them 
finds its place. And God says to men, 
" Be patient ; all things will work to- 
gether for good to them that love me." 
You may be threads of different sizes 
and kinds and colors ; but there is a 
machinery, as it were, like a power 
loom, in the hands of God, by which 
everything shall be brought right. 

1 164. God, Central in Human Af- 
fairs. — Astronomers have taught us 
that the satellites circle about their 
planets, and they around their sun. 
It was for a long time thought that 
our sun stood still ; but no, it is found 
that it has also a motion ; that it has 
some remote and undiscovered cen- 
ter ; and that while surrounded by sat- 
ellites it is itself a satellite ; and there 
are evidences also that the whole stel- 
lar system, so far as it is disclosed, has 
a certain drift, and that there is, at 
some immeasurable, inconceivable 
distance, a glorious center which all 
this vast creation is serving. Look 
into the heavens, and think of it, and 
be bewildered ! 

So, too, in the infinite complexity 
of human affairs, in all the experiences 



of generations and ages, there is a 
divine overruling providence repress- 
ing evil and causing it to praise God, 
and promoting good. 

1 1 65. Uncompleted Providences. — 
The cactus has an ungainly leaf, fat 
and thick, and full of thorns, so that 
when men see it growing, they say, 
" It is a clumsy and hateful thing, 
ugly to look upon, and it pierces you 
whenever you touch it." Wait! When 
at last that plant, which grows in arid 
places, where hardly any weed will 
grow, with thick and succulent leaves, 
and a tough skin, and which stands 
almost without root through the whole 
year, — when at last it has come to the 
point where it is developed, is there in 
the whole kingdom of beauty a blos- 
som that is for exquisiteness of form 
and tint equal to the cactus blossom ? 
It is the very perfection of beauty 
growing out of the very emblem of 
homeliness. And as it is with the vege- 
table kingdom, so it is with many de- 
velopments of the divine kingdom, 
God's providence may look like a 
cactus leaf. But wait till it blossoms, 
and see how glorious is its beauty. 

1 1 66. Providence and Natural Law. 
— If God is comparable to the average 
of ordinary men and women, he can 
meddle with natural laws ; and he 
does, for your benefit and for mine. 
And it does not destroy the economy 
of the globe, that he does do it. Do 
you suppose, when wool is put on the 
wheel of the old house-wife (some of 
you may remember the days when 
such a thing was known), and she 
spins it out in long threads, that it is a 
violation of natural law, because the 
wool was made to grow on a sheep's 
back ? And is it a violation of nat- 
ural law that the shuttle carries the 
thread backward and forward to make 
cloth for you ? No. All through the 
world natural laws take on human 



GOD 



253 



thought and human feehng. They 
serve those that know how to persuade 
them. What is this, but the control 
of the human spirit over natural law ? 
And is God less than a man ? Is he 
not even as big as a philosopher ? 

1 167. Providence: Natural and Su- 
pernatural. — There is a little provi- 
dence in every good family. A father 
and a mother, discreet, and with ex- 
perience, are all the time fore-thinking 
for their children ; and it is done so 
quietly that the child never knows 
what is going on, or that there is any 
plan being carried out. And it is not 
simply for to-day and to-morrow : it 
runs from winter to summer, and 
through summer to winter. Not only 
that, but a very wise parent does this 
with a general reference to the out- 
come of the children in after life. 

Now, there is an enormous distance 
between the knowledge and experience 
of the parents and that of the children ; 
but it is as nothing compared with the 
vast gulf which there is between us 
and God. And if we can carry on 
this little providence with regard to 
our children, which, if they had a 
glimpse of it, would seem as mys- 
terious to them as to us the divine 
providence seems ; how much more 
shall our Father who is in heaven 
carry on this infinitely greater provi- 
dence in regard to us ! 

1 168. "Without Me, Nothing." — 
When Love says to love," You are 
nothing without me," love feels en- 
riched. And when God says that we 
are dependent upon him, it is not for 
the sake of shaking his crown in our 
faces ; it is not for the sake of making 
his power flame before our eyes ; it is 
not equivalent to his saying, " How 
weak you are down there ! and how 
strong I am up here ! " It is as the 
bending of the mother over the cradle, 
and soothing the fears of the little 



child. It is as the benediction of the 
old man who bids his children hope in 
dark and trying days. It is the as- 
surance of protection. It is the con- 
ferring of a parental blessing. It is a 
declaration of love on the part of God. 

1 169. Making Use of God. — The 
nature of God is the same to all men, 
but the effects are not the same on all 
men, because they do not all put it to 
the same uses. . . . The sun shines 
on the south side of my barn, and what 
does it produce there ? A warm spot, 
where chickens and cows gather. It 
shines on the south side of my neigh- 
bor's barn ; and what does it produce 
there? Flowers and grapes. What 
is the reason of the difference ? Does 
the sun change ? No : but it is put to 
different uses. 

1 1 70. The Standard for Life. — Not 
a sea-captain goes out of the harbor 
that he does not take his chronometer 
from the watchmaker's the last thing 
before he starts ; and the whole 
voyage, after his departure, is de- 
termined by calculations based on 
that chronometer. A man may set 
his heart, every morning, by the heart 
of God. 

1 171. Spirit of Beneficence. — When 
the ragged-edged cloud comes sweep- 
ing through our fields in summer, and 
the children of joy rush from the 
picnic ground to hide themselves ; 
when the thunders bellow in the 
heavens, and the mighty winds sweep 
by, what say they to the ear of faith 
that can listen? "We drops of rain, 
driven by winds and bolted down by 
thunders, we come in terror, but our 
errand is one of mercy. We search 
out the parched things ; we wash the 
leaves of the poison weed as well as 
those of the wholesome herb, and we 
are everywhere saying that such is 
God, who pours his influence upon 
things good and bad, that the bad 



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RELIGIOUS LIFE 



things may become good, and that the 
good things may become better." 

1 172. Divine Impulse of Love. — 
The violet blossoms and sheds its 
fragrance that others may see it and be 
made happy by it. It is this impulse 
from the Divine mind, initial, germi- 
nant, far from full accomplishment and 
development in the human mind, that 
we are to unfold and cultivate as 
children of God. It is this disposition 
by all the means in our power to 
make men happier by making them 
better, and to make them better by 
making them happier, that is the 
divine element which we are to learn 
in the school of Christ. 

1 1 73. The Sympathy of God. — A 
great mountain lifts itself up, with 
perpendicular face, over against some 
quiet valley ; and when summer 
thunders with great storms, the chff 
echoes the thunder, and rolls it forth 
a second time, with majesty increased ; 
and we think that, to be sublime, 
storms should awaken mountain 
echoes, and that then cause and effect 
are worthy of each other. But so, 
too, an oriole, or a song-sparrow, 
singing before it, hears its own little 
song sung back again. A little child, 
lost, and crying, in the valley, hears 
the great cliff weeping just as it 
weeps ; and, in sooth, the mountain 
repeats whatever is sounded, from the 
sublimest notes of the tempest to the 
sweetest bird-whisper or child-weep- 
fng ; and it is just as easy to do the 
little as the great, and more beautiful. 
Now God is our rock, and from his 
heart is reflected every experience, 
every feehng of joy or grief, that any 
human soul utters or knows. 

1 1 74. God's Willingness to Give. — 
Ah ! when the apples are ripe, a 
child's foot against the tree will bring 
scores and scores of them to the 
ground. He might take his little 



stick and throw it twenty times, and 
not hit more than a single apple ; for 
he would be working according to his 
own skill, and would accomplish but 
little ; but when he strikes the trunk 
of the tree, dozens of apples have 
been waiting for that, and they drop 
at his feet, and he gets twenty times 
as many as he would do by plying his 
stick merely. Now in every part of 
life God has fruit ready to drop into 
your lap ; and the abundance that you 
get is not to be measured by the skill 
with which you can throw, but by 
that divine nature which does exceed- 
ing abundantly more than we can ask 
or think. 

1175. Christ's Interpretation of God. 
— Pity in the family of a wise, upright, 
large-minded man, is consistent with 
penalty. The parent is sorry for the 
child that he is punishing ; and just so 
soon as the punishment has checked 
the evil in the child, the parent helps 
to cure the very suffering which he 
himself has caused. He and the 
child are not enemies because they 
are at the two ends of the whip. The 
whip is held by the heart at one end, 
and it is meant to reach the heart at 
the other end — though it does it by 
devious ways. In the administration 
of pain in the family, love administers 
it ; and it is for the purposes of love 
that it is administered. Thus the 
prayer that we learned to lisp with out 
earliest days ; the prayer that as a 
blessing has hung over the world for 
two thousand years, and that still, 
morning and night, is breathed by 
myriad infant lips — "Our Father 
which art in heaven " — interprets the 
nature of God from the side of the 
family. 

1 176. The Glory of God. — When 
Moses said, "God, show me thy 
glory," God refused to show him his 
glory in the sense in which the prophet 



GOD 



^55 



thought of it — that is, with scenic out- 
flash, revealing angels trooping about 
the throne, and exhibiting all the 
manifestations of divine power. Moses 
thought to see wonderful visions ; but 
God said, " I will show you my good- 
ness." It is as if God, pointing to his 
goodness, said, " This is my glory." 

What is God's goodness? "The 
Lord, the Lord God, merciful and 
gracious, long-suffering, and abun- 
dant in goodness and truth, keeping 
mercy for thousands, forgiving 
iniquity, and transgression and sin." 
Although he brought up the end, by 
saying, "and that will by no means 
clear the guilty," you see there was 
but one clause of that, while all the 
other branches and twigs of the sen- 
tence were of mercy and goodness. 

1 177. The Divine Paternity. — The 
opening phrase, Our Father, is the 
key to Christianity. God is father ; 
government is personal. All the 
tenderness which now is stored up in 
the word "mother" was of old in- 
cluded in the name "father." The 
household was governed by law, and 
yet it was small enough to enable the 
father to make himself the exponent 
of love and law, 

1 178. God the Father, not Avenger. 
— I can conceive of an obstinate man, 
or a proud parent whose pride has 
been wounded by the misconduct of a 
child, who needs persuasion and 
reasoning to induce him to do right, 
and to help him bring his own best 
feelings into the judgment-seat, and 
keep down his worst feelings ; but to 
suppose that the divine Father re- 
quires any such intercession as this, 
and that there is wrath, burning hot, 
an unquenched, unslaked zeal of jus- 
tice in his bosom, which will down 
when Christ comes before him, but on 
which no effect is produced when 
men, in all the generations of time, 



and in myriad numbers, suffering, 
weeping and wailing, lift themselves 
up before him — is simply awful ! 

1 179. God's Kingship. — We are 
obliged to interpret God from our- 
selves ; and our danger is that we 
shall interpret him from the baser side 
of human experience, and not from 
the nobler. If we interpret the divine 
government from human monarchy, 
we must take the ideal monarchy, and 
not the real ; we must take those con- 
ceptions of monarchy which have 
carried in them the most gladness and 
generosity and royalty for others, and 
not those which have produced the 
impression of an iron nature, and a 
scepter clenched for the sake of op- 
pression and wrong. 

1 1 80. God, the Universal Medica- 
ment. — Ask the physician what it is 
that he trusts to throw out morbific in- 
fluences from the human system. If 
there be diseased organs, what cures 
them? Do you think pills do the 
work? They do but little except to 
say to the lazy organ, " Wake up and 
go to work, and throw out the enemy 
that is preying upon you ! " If a man 
gets well, he cures himself — often, 
thanks to the doctor ; oftener, thanks 
to the nurse ; always, thanks to na- 
ture. What is the stream that carries 
reparation to the wasted parts, that 
carries stimulation to the dormant 
parts, that carries nutrition to the ex' 
hausted parts ? What is it that fights ? 
It is the blood. God's soul and na- 
ture are the blood of the universe. 

n8i. The Divine Measurement. — 
In estimating men we must reject the 
sensuous measure, and drop from our 
minds the idea of magnitude. If you 
saw a man as great as Shakespeare, or 
as great as Goethe, undergoing mighty 
struggles, you would have sympathy 
for him ; but if it was a poor cobbler 
on the bench, or a pauper, that was 



256 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



undergoing struggles, you would 
rather smile in pity, and pass by. 
Not so God. His sympathy does not 
depend upon how large a man is, or 
how richly he is endowed with original 
forces of mind. 

1182. Divine Justice. — After an ex- 
perience of thousands of years, the 
State says, " I do not consider a man 
fit to take care of his own business un- 
til he is twenty-one years old." Men 
are not regarded as ripe enough to be 
fully responsible to the laws of their 
country before they have reached that 
age. Some are mature a great deal 
earlier, but some, not until a great 
deal later ; and some, never, but the 
State, judging from the average ex- 
perience of its history, says, " I will 
not commit to a man his property, and 
hold him fully responsible, except 
through his parents or guardians, until 
he is twenty-one." And is God less 
tender and less considerate than men ? 

1 183. Eternity of the Divine Love. 
— If a blind man, who had never seen 
the heavens, or the earth, or the sweet 
faces of those that loved him, should 
have a surgical operation performed 
upon his eyes, so that he could see ob- 
jects around him, he would think to 
himself, on going out of doors, " O, 
how things are blossoming ! The 
earth is beginning to be beautiful ! 
Mountains and hills are springing up 
in every direction ! The forms of lov- 
ing friends are being raised up to greet 
my gaze ! And the sun has just be- 
gun to shine forth from the heavens ! " 
But have not these things existed, al- 
though the man's eyes have not before 
been in a condition to see them? 

When we are brought into the con- 
sciousness of what God's love is to our 
poor sinful natures, we oftentimes have 
the feeling that God is beginning to be 
reconciled to us. No : it was then 
that we began to realize his love, but 



his love for us had existed from the 
time we came into being, and had ever 
continued with us. 

1 184. God's Goodness Waits for 
Men. — Because colliers live in the 
bowels of the earth and sometimes do 
not see the sun rise or set for weeks 
and months together, or because im- 
prisoned men in dungeons do not wit- 
ness the changes of the seasons, does 
it follow that there is no rising of the 
sun, or that there is neither spring nor 
summer for the human family ? If one 
avoids the light of the sun, shuts him- 
self out from it, he may miss it, but it 
is waiting for him : so is God's goodness. 

1185. God Symbolized in Human 
Love. — You, mother, take your child 
though he is imperfect ; you, lover, 
take the one that you love in spite of 
imperfections ; and that which enables 
you to do these things is just a breath 
of that which is the hfe of God. Your 
power to give yourself for those that 
are inferior to you and beneath you, is 
a mere spark of that grand sacrifice 
which God made for the salvation of 
the world. 

1186. God's Tenderness for the 
Weak. — When conflagration comes to 
the house, for whom does the mother 
run first ? The great stalwart hus- 
band ? Her eldest son ? She does 
not think of them. It is the helpless, 
worthless babe in the cradle that she 
first rushes to save. Its worthlessness 
is to her more precious than the stars. 
Its helplessness is a supreme and 
omnipotent appeal to her heart. 

For whom does God think first ? 
Glowing seraphs ? Radiant angels ? 
Not for them : for the poor ; for the 
forgotten ; for those that drop silent 
tears in obscure places ; for those that 
wear galling chains and rot in prisons. 

1187. "Thy Will be Done." — 
God's will is universal harmony. On 
earth, men are largely ignorant of this 



GOD 



257 



regulative will, and are irregular in 
their obedience to that which is known, 
or are wholly disobedient and rebel- 
lious. But in heaven perfect obedience 
follows knowledge. The will of God 
is unobstructed. Men are here in the 
uproar of an untuned orchestra, each 
instrument at discord with its fellows ; 
but in heaven the chorus will flow for- 
ever in harmonious sweetness. 

1 188. Divine and Human Nature. — 
If you take a microscopic instrument, 
and examine the sting of a bee, mag- 
nifying it thousands of times, you will 
find that it still is so smooth that the 
eye can detect no variations upon its 
surface. But if you take the finest 
needle that is manufactured, and look 
at it through a powerful microscope, 
you will find that it will appear rough 
in the proportion in which it is mag- 
nified. This figure illustrates the dif- 
ference between the Divine nature and 
the nature of man. The more you 
magnify your true conceptions of God's 
nature, the more beautiful does he ap- 
pear ; whereas the more you magnify 
the nature of man the more ugly does 
he appear. 

1 189. God's Free Grace. — My gar- 
den sucks up all the light of the sun it 
wants ; but see how myriad beams of 
vagrant sunlight come pouring past. 
See how they spread out uselessly on 
the rock. See how they bathe the old 
moss-covered shingles of the barn. See 
how they pour themselves down on the 
dead tree as well as on the living tree. 
See how they shed their influence on 
the dank swamp as well as on the 
fertile field ; and on the ocean as well 
as on the land. The sun floods the 
earth with light and warmth more than 
it can use or receive, and fills infinite 
space everywhere with its bounty. 
Now, shall the sun, that is but a mat- 
ter-point in the Universe, do this ; and 
shall the soul of God, in pouring out 



his grace and love, be governed by 
the length of your prayer, or the size 
of your heart, or any such poor, petty 
measure ? 

1 190. God's Gracious Bounty. — 
What \s grace? It is that divine com- 
passion which is infinitely higher than 
the sweetest affection that ever 
bloomed in mortal soul. That great 
kindness, that wonderful generosity, 
that unending mercy, that goodness, 
which is eternal and infinite in the 
soul of God — that is grace. Grace 
means divine disposition, divine be- 
neficence. It is no trafficking quality. 
It is not a quid quo pro. Is there a 
bargaining transaction between the 
sun and the blossoms by which they 
are permitted to have light and heat ? 
No. They are what they are by rea- 
son of the sun's free bounty. And it 
is by the grace of God that we are en- 
abled to be anything good. It is by 
his nature and disposition. It is by 
what he is inherently, and not by 
what he is hired to be, or coaxed to be. 

11 91. God's Abundance. — Thou 
dost overflow the earth. Thou never 
measurest thy rain ; Thou askest 
nothing how much it needs, but the 
light and rain and air fill all space 
around about in overmeasure, tran- 
scending all use. So let thy spiritual 
mercies abound, not according to the 
measure of our want, but according to 
the greatness of thy love ! 

1 1 92. God as Disciplinarian. — God 
was represented to be like a father in 
a family, who, when the children 
have got into one of their snarls, pre- 
sents himself to them with a clouded 
brow, and with a disciplinary hand, 
and is, for the time being, to the chil- 
dren, a stern and dreadful father. 

I do not think there were any days 
in my life which were so gloomy as 
the days when I knew I was going to 
have a whipping. On those days 



258 



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when a whipping had not come, but 
when I saw it coming, my father was 
a clay of judgment to me ; and yet, a 
whipping was what I needed for the 
purpose of disciphne, and it was given 
to me for that purpose. 

1 1 93 . Human and Divine Sympathy. 
— Do you suppose that if, when cross- 
ing the plains, I saw a man who had 
abused me desolate and sick, I would 
not get off the car and help him ? 
Would I leave him to the Indians, or 
to starvation? Would I not succor 
him in his distress ? And am I better 
than God? Am I more sympathetic 
towards those who are suffering than 
he is ? And if I know how to forgive 
an enemy, and how to pray for those 
who despitefully use me, and how to 
love them into rectitude, how much 
more does the divine nature know 
how to do these things ! 

1194. The Divine Comforter. — Look 
upon the great caravan of pilgrims 
who move towards thee, O Thou 
Comforter of the ages ! and have 
compassion upon each one. Yea, 
give to every one God's blessing ac- 
cording to his several need — the con- 
sciousness that God is thinking of him, 
and is merciful, and waits to be gra- 
cious towards him. 

1195. God's Patience. — Man is 
weak and sinful and necessitous ; and 
God is represented in the Bible as a 
Being adapting his administration to 
the human condition, because he is 
infinite in patience, all the time requir- 
ing perfectness, but continually bear- 
ing with men on their way up to per- 
fection. A man who is fit to teach art 
is a man who is himself sensitive to 
art, and who has patience with rude 
hands and clumsy drawing. His busi- 
ness, as a schoolmaster, is to wait for 
those who do not know how to do fine 
things finely, brooding over them, 
and helping them. And if it is that to 



be a schoolmaster, what is it to be a 
parent, but to take rude, unlicked 
cubs in the shape of children, and 
bring them up out of vices, through 
all manner of rudenesses and crude- 
nesses, by patience, by forbearance, 
by suffering, and by love, waiting till 
they become something by training? 
And how do we learn to bear with 
nascent beings, giving our thoughts 
for theirs, and our feelings for theirs, 
but by acting under the inspiration of 
the Spirit of God ? 

1 1 96. God's Mercies. — There is dew 
in one flower and not in another, be- 
cause one opens its cup and takes it 
in, while the other closes itself, and 
the drops run off. God rains his 
goodness and mercy as wide-spread 
as the dew ; if we lack, it is because 
we will not open our hearts to receive. 

1 197. Despised Blessings. — I can 
imagine an old Israelite walking out 
in the morning, and seeing the manna 
lying all around him on the ground, 
and looking on it with contempt. It 
was like little bits of coriander seed ; 
but by collecting enough of it and 
eating it they could satisfy hunger. 
And we may suppose that an Israelite, 
hearing that God was going to work a 
miracle by giving bread from heaven, 
said, " When God gives us bread 
what bread it will be ! " Then he 
goes out and sees this little manna ly- 
ing around ; and he says, " Hem ! do 
you suppose I am going to eat that? 
Not I. I would rather go hungry." 

There is a great deal of manna 
under men's feet that would satisfy 
them if they would gather and eat it ; 
but they will not touch it. 

1 1 98. The Great Heart of God. — 
Ten thousand armies might bathe in 
the ocean, and neither sully its purity 
nor exhaust its cleansing power. Yet 
the ocean is but a cup by the side of 
God's heart. Realms and orbs may 



GOD 



259 



bathe and rise into purity ; no words 
will ever hint or dimly paint the height 
and depth and length and breadth of 
the love of Christ. It is love that 
pours, endless and spontaneous, just 
as sunlight does — simply because God 
is love ! 

1 199. God's Love. — Is it the sum- 
mer that coaxes the sun to come back 
now from his far southern circuit? Is 
it the counsel of the daisies upon the 
hillsides ? Is it the voice of the all- 
persuasive violets in the nook that 
send messages to the far-off spring, 
saying, " Come, for the grass tarries? 
Come, for the flowers wait " ? Or is 
the sun carrying rather, in his own 
nature, all the daisies, and all the vio- 
lets, and all the fruits ; and will he 
pour out of his royal love the summer 
warmth that shall make all the trees 
and the valleys green? God does not 
wait to recognize loveliness before he 
loves ; he makes loveliness by loving. 

1200. The Fullness of God. — Man's 
lamp is daily filled and trimmed, 
emblem of his own mind, that by rest 
and sleep refills its waste. But who 
ever gave fuel to the sun, or trimmed 
the mighty tlame that, of its own in- 
exhaustible vitality, burns, and flashes, 
and rushes in infinite floods, and beats 
without wave or sound upon the shores 
of countless worlds ? The sun needs 
no trimming. Man's lamp and man 
alike need continual trimming and fill- 
ing. God's lamp and God pour forth 
forever untrimmed and unfilled. He 
is the God of ages, and yet is not old. 
He is venerable in eternal youth. 

1 20 1. God's Mothering of His Chil- 
dren. — As little children, who are 
caught up from their fears and their 
weariness into a mother's arms, so 
catch us up, to-day, that we may 
know something of the bosom of God, 
that mysterious depth which hath in it 
no .storm, over which riseth no day 



nor night, and in which is the eternal 
joy of thy soul, and of all who are in 
Thee — the joy of the present and the 
hope of the future. 

1202. The Delicacy of God. — Many 
think God sits brooding in heaven as 
storms brood in summer skies, full of 
bolts and rain, and believe that they 
must come to him under the covert of 
some apology, or beneath some um- 
brellaed excuse, lest the clouds should 
break and the tempest overwhelm 
them. But when men repent towards 
God, they go not to storms, but to 
serene and tranquil skies, and to a 
Father who waits to receive them with 
all tender delicacy and love. 

1203. God Easy to be Entreated. — 
Any view which presents God as a 

being whose justice shall make sin- 
ners who wish to return to him unable 
to do so, is a false view. Public senti- 
ment and public law are like ramparts 
around a city. As long as a man is 
inside of the ramparts, they defend 
him ; but the moment he is outside of 
them, they treat him as an enemy, 
and he cannot get back, but is ex- 
posed to the sweep of artillery. Pub- 
lic sentiment and law may save a man 
before he has done wrong, but they 
damn him after he has done wrong. 
It is not so with God. Up hill is down 
hill if it be towards God ! 

1204. God's Forgiving Love. — 
When you think of your mother do 
you not see that those points where 
you were the most difficult to get along 
with are the points in which her char- 
acter showed sweetest, most radiant, 
most beauteous ? From the sinfulness 
of my nature I think I get the noblest 
views of God's patience, his forgiving 
love, his kindness, his generosity, and 
that great-heartedness by which, look- 
ing upon my transgression, he says to 
me, " Be not discouraged ; try again ; 
I am not ashamed to call you brother." 



26o 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



1205. The Ground of Forgiveness. 
— What is the ground of forgive- 
ness? It does not lie in the recipient 
at all. It lies in the giver. A gener- 
ous man gives away handful after 
handful of money, why ? Because 
the act bounds back with pleasure to 
him inwardly. Forgiveness is the in- 
stinctive action of a true generosity in 
a man. Why do some men speak 
with figures of beauty ? Because it is 
their duty to do it ? No; but because 
they cannot help themselves. They 
see visions in the air, and they paint 
pictures unconsciously. In their na- 
ture they do it because their nature 
tends to act in that way. Why 
does God forgive ? Because it is his 
nature to forgive. He loves to forgive. 

i2o5. God's Forgiveness Remedial. 
— Let me saw off a branch from one 
of the trees that is now budding in 
my garden, and all summer long there 
will be an ugly scar where the gash 
has been made ; but by next autumn 
it will be perfectly covered over by 
the growing ; and by the following 
autumn it will be hidden out of sight ; 
and in four or five years there will be 
but a slight scar to show where it has 
been ; and in ten or twenty years you 
would never suspect that there had 
been an amputation. 

Trees know how to overgrow their 
injuries, and hide them : and love 
does not wait so long as trees do ; it 
knows how to throw out all divine and 
beneficent juices, as it were, and hide 
from sight the wrongs done. God 
says he forgives in the same way. 
He will never again make mention, 
as he declares in Ezekiel to his people, 
of their sins. 

1207. God's Forgiveness Absolute, 
— Paul, in describing the forgiveness 
of God wrought through Jesus Christ, 
uses this remarkable figure : "Blot- 
ting out the handwriting of ordinances 



that was against us." It is like taking 
an indictment in court, and tearing it 
up and throwing it away. It is like 
taking a title-deed of a man's posses- 
sion, a paper on which is written evi- 
dence that is fatal to his claim, and 
blotting it, or burning it. It is like 
taking away proof against a man 
which may lead to his injury. 

1208. Love in Justice. — The great- 
bosomed mother, the radiant face of a 
love watching that pain shall not go a 
bit too far, but still pressing it, and 
still insisting upon it, says, "My dear 
child, I will not suffer you to grow up 
so. I cannot live and see you become 
bad. My darling, you shall not be 
bad. By all the love that is in me, 
and by all the hope that is in me, and 
by all the prophecy of a mother's 
heart, you shall not be bad. I will 
cry with you, but cry you shall ! It 
is necessary to make you sweeter and 
nobler. " Is not that justice ? 

i2og. Neglect of God's Promises. 
— Many men carry the promises of 
the Word of God as a miser carries 
bank bills, the face of which calls for 
countless treasures, but which he does 
not carry to the bank for presentation. 
An ignorant man takes a hundred- 
pound-note. He does not know what 
the stamp means, but he has been 
told that it means that the note is 
worth a hundred pounds sterling. It 
is worth nothing at all unless it will 
draw what it promises ; and the way 
for the holder to ascertain whether it 
is worth anything or not, is to take it 
to the paying teller and see if it will 
draw the money. 

1 2 10. God's Promises Sincere. — 
When the waves rush in upon the 
beach, there is an undertow that 
sweeps back ; and the water, while it 
seems to be flowing one way, is often- 
times found to be flowing the other, 
to the peril of those who have the 



GOD 



261 



misfortune to be at its mercy. And 
so some think that there is beneath 
the waves of God's ofifer of salvation, 
a dark necessity of Government, like 
an undertow, that sweeps men out 
towards destruction. There is no such 
thing. With God it is Yea and Amen. 
If he says that he loves and will for- 
give those who desire and strive to 
turn from their sins and live, he is 
earnest and sincere — intensely earnest 
and sincere, beyond any conception 
of these qualities in men. 

121 1. God's Promises Earnest. — It 
may be presumptuous for you to go 
into a stranger's house without an in- 
vitation, and sit down and act as 
though you were at home, and call 
for services at the hands of the serv- 
ants ; but if a man has invited you to 
come and see him, and met you at the 
door, and placed at your service a 
room, and said, "Stay here as long 
as you will, and while you stay my 
table shall be yours, my raiment 
shall be yours, and my servants shall 
be yours," then it is presumptuous for 
you not to take him at his word. It is 
politeness, when a man asks you to 
accept his hospitality, to take it for 
granted that he means what he says. 
Be not afraid to appropriate the prom- 
ises of God ! 

1212. God's Love and Man's Need. 
— Persons are apt to say, " Ah ! if I 
were like Madame Guyon or like Eu- 
genie de Guerin, God might take an 
interest in me ; but I am no such 
person ; I have no graces, no excel- 
lencies, no virtues. I have nothing 
but faults ; these show themselves all 
the time. I am a poor, miserable 
creature ; there is very little chance 
for me." Their mistake is in not re- 
membering, or their misfortune is in 
not understanding, that the grace of 
God displays itself in the ratio and 
proportion in which people need it. 



The heart of Christ's leaching was 
this: " They that are whole need not 
a physician, but they that are sick." 

1213. God's Emotion. — The Greek 
idea of perfection was born of the 
artist. It is not strange that those 
whose conception of a hero was one 
perfectly beautiful, always young, 
wise, strong, perfectly serene and 
happy, superior to all the troubles 
and vexations which befall mortals, 
should have deemed it necessary to a 
lofty view of Deity that he should be 
insusceptible to pain. But the whole 
Bible is like a magnificent chant of 
the Divine emotion, running through 
every possible modification of feeling. 
He sorrows, pities, loves, longs, strives, 
joys, abhors, relents. God's nature is 
full and deep as the ocean, and pulses 
on every shore around the world and 
through all time, every inflection of 
feehng which springs from purity, 
rectitude, and benevolence. 

1 2 14. God's Generosity. — A man 
says, " Here are thousand-dollar 
bills; take as many as you please." 
But say I, "There are hundreds, and 
fifties, and tens, and fives, and ones ; 
may I take those instead of the thou- 
sands ? " If he says I may have the 
thousands, he will not refuse to give 
me the ones. If he gives me the larger, 
he will not refuse me the smaller. 

Now God has given his own Son to 
us ; he has given himself to us ; he 
has made overtures of personal friend- 
ship to us ; he has said, " I am your 
Father, and ye are my sons ; " he 
has granted us the blessing of direct 
communion with himself; and since 
he has given us these higher and 
larger things, is there anything that 
we need, all the way down to the very 
sandals with which we tread the earth, 
that he will not give us ? 

1215. Why God Loves Men. — If I 
go out, on a bright Sabbath morning, 



262 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



to find children to bring into the mis- 
sion school, and 1 meet a child skirted 
with the whitest of dimity, and 
trimmed till you would think that the 
ribbon shop had been bankrupted, do 
I say to her, "You little dear, come 
into my school"? Not at all. She 
is not the kind that I am looking after. 
But if I meet a rat-haired urchin, 
ragged and redolent of the gutter, and 
smelling of all the food of all the 
hotels for the last month, and sharp 
and impudent, and a most un- 
lovely wretch, I say to myself, 
"There is a boy that needs me." 
Oh, how poor ! oh, how ignorant ! oh, 
how besotted ! oh, how full of all 
evil ! but he has an eternity before 
him ; he has a kingdom of heaven to 
gain or to lose ; and by as much as 
he needs me by so much I choose 
him, and would fain coax him into my 
school, by kindness, by goodness, 
and by winning his confidence ; I 
choose him because he is so bad. 
God chooses not angels but men, to 
receive his redemptive love. 



1 21 6. Constancy of God's Goodness. 
— As the heaven, even in the times of 
plague or of battle, arches above the 
earth, crystaUine, full by night and 
by day of light, so, over all the vulgar 
struggles of life, rise the thoughts of 
thy compassion, thy tender mercies, 
and thy loving kindness. 

1217. Gifts to God. — If you pluck 
gold from the mountain, pearls from 
the deep, precious stones from all the 
river brooks, or curious workmanship 
from the hand of the artisan, and 
bring them to God — they were his be- 
fore. You only bring him his own 
property. You cannot make God 
rich. But, yes ! When we are talk- 
ing about love, one can make another 
rich. Is there anything that makes a 
father prouder, or that fills his hours 
of thoughtfulness with sweeter music, 
than the knowledge that one child 
after another is putting forth blossoms, 
and beginning to bear fruit ? O how 
rich is fatherdom ! God is a Father, 
and the riches that he wants are those 
which love desires. 



XXIII . JESUS CHRIST 



1218. Christ, our Hope. — Every 
day may we have Hfe in Christ ; and 
in that life only, a hope of the future : 
no horizon in the past full of brooding 
thunders, but the sun rising evermore 
before us, full of light and morning ! 

121 9. Interpretation of God. — O 
throne of iron, from which have been 
launched terrible lightning and 
thunders that have daunted men ! 
O throne of crystal, that has coldly 
thrown out beams upon the intellect 
of mankind ! O throne of mystery, 
about which have been clouds and 
darkness ! Not ye ! But O throne of 
Grace, where he sits regnant who was 
my brother, who has tasted of my lot, 
who knows my trouble, my sorrow. 



my yearning and longing for im- 
mortality ! O Jesus, crowned, not for 
thine own glory, but with power of 
love for the emancipation of all 
struggling spirits ! Thou art my God 
— my God ! 

1220. God, the Healer of Souls. — 
I was walking near Lane Seminary 
(where I studied theology without a 
hope), and was working over a lesson. 
The idea dawned upon me, not that 
there had been a covenant formed 
between God and his Son, but that 
Christ revealed the nature of God, 
whose very soul was curative, and 
who brought himself and his living 
holiness to me, because I needed so 
much, and not because I was so de- 



JESUS CHRIST 



263 



serving. That instant the clouds 
rose, and the whole heaven was 
radiant, and I exclaimed, " I have 
found God! " It was the first time I 
had found him. Good, his name was ; 
and I went like one crazed up and 
down through the fields, half crying, 
half laughing, singing and praying and 
shouting like a good Methodist. 

Tliis has been my continued ex- 
perience. In the suffering I have 
gone through, in the anguish I have 
seen in other people, and in my labor 
to rescue men, it has been my sup- 
port. The keynote of my life and 
ministry has been that while men are 
low down, and can be reached by 
nothing but the gad or spur, I would 
use that, and stimulate them by it, 
rather than that they should be lost ; 
but that as soon as I could awaken 
their reason and conscience by any 
other means — by hope, love, fidelity, 
truth, honor, rectitude, or the repre- 
sentation of Christ's tenderness and 
gentleness — I would use this. If such 
motives were more abundantly appHed 
to men the fruit would be ampler, to 
the glory of God, and to the welfare 
of the human race. 

1 22 1. The Historic and the Personal 
Christ. — No artist can paint a portrait 
except by pigments ; but the pigments 
are not the portrait. There must be 
the various colors on his palette, and 
but for them he might not be able to 
bring out the likeness which he at- 
tempts to produce ; but after all he 
has brought it out, and it is the like- 
ness of your mother, your wife, your 
child, your friend, it is not the pig- 
ments that you see or think of: it is 
the living face which these represent. 
Now, we need the Christ of the text, 
the historic Christ, the Christ of art, 
and the philosophic Christ ; but they 
are mere pigments, as it were, that we 
lay on the palette ; and our Christ, if we 



have one that is to us what Paul's was 
to him, is the Christ that was revealed 
to us when our heart was like a 
cluster, and God crushed it till the 
very blood flowed out as wine. 

1222. The Nature of Christ. — Who 
can paint the portrait of an opal ! It 
is only so much as you can at one 
point see that you can paint. You 
cannot paint the flash, nor the luster, 
nor the varying colors. You cannot 
take in such a nature as Christ's, with 
all its relations to heaven above and 
to the earth beneath, and all its social 
and esthetic qualities, and all its divine 
elements ; not simply because they 
elude your grasp, running out beyond 
analysis and research, but because 
they are so combined, so changeable, 
so constantly coming and going, with 
various phases and in various ways, 
that no man can give the whole of it. 
There is always more. 

1223. The Higher View of Christ. — 
Do you suppose that astronomy was 
destroyed when it was corrected by 
Copernicus and Galileo? Men had 
their notions about the whole planetary 
heavens, and those notions were all 
swept away ; but it did not destroy the 
orbs. Men had their idea of the ori- 
gin of the earth. That idea was 
swept away, and new ideas came in 
its place, and we are the better for it. 
And because the philosophy that has 
surrounded the name and work of the 
Lord Jesus Christ is rising above its 
obscure and relatively false basis, or 
method of explanation, clearing away 
obstructions and giving us a vision of 
God manifest in the flesh more noble, 
more regal, do you suppose that is go- 
ing to destroy Christ or the power of 
his Gospel ? It will make him stronger. 

1224. Admiration, not Love. — Plato 
thought, and inscribed his thoughts. 
We may read and admire them, and 
we may admire as much of Plato as 



264 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



we discern. WIkU do we discern of 
him ? Only that he was a very in- 
tellectual man. VVc admire his work- 
manship. I may admire such a man 
as could make the watch which I 
carry. I do not know who he is ; he 
may beat his wife for ought I know ; 
he may be a mean man ; but he is 
very skillful for all that. There is a 
distinction to be made between a cool 
regard for Christ on account of what 
he has done, and a love for him on 
account of what he is. 

1225. The Life of Jesus. — If you 
wished to look at a portrait of Ra- 
phael's, what would you think to see 
only the forehead uncovered, and then 
only the eyes, and so on, until all the 
features had been separately seen? 
Could you gain a true idea of the 
picture as a whole ? Yet this is the 
way men look at the picture of Christ 
in the Gospels, reading a few verses 
and mottoes here and there, and never 
considering the life in its wholeness 
and harmony. 

1226. The Humiliation of Christ. — 
Christ not merely accepted this-world 
residence, but he went in at the bot- 
tom. What is to many minds a 
stumbling-block is to me a profound 
truth— that since the Highest was to 
come into this world, he came in not 
alone by the lowest section of poverty, 
but he came in, apparently to all men, 
through the door of illegitimacy. 
Every child honors and glorifies his 
father and his mother. It is a matter 
of universal reproach where one can- 
not call some one his father ; but when 
our Saviour entered life, he entered 
putatively through the door of illegiti- 
macy. Is there anything lower than 
that for a beginning ? 

1227. The Childhood of Jesus. — 
There was nothing that we know of, 
to distinguish this child from any 
other that ever was born. 



This then was not a divinity coming 
through the clouds into human life, 
full-orbed, triumphing with the un- 
diminished strength of a heavenly na- 
ture over those conditions which men 
must bear. If this was a divine per- 
son, it was a divine child, and child- 
hood meant latent power, undeveloped 
faculty, unripe organs ; a being with- 
out habits, without character, without 
experience ; a cluster of germs, a 
branch full of unblossomed buds, a 
mere seed of manhood. Except his 
mother's arms, there was no circle of 
light about his head, fondly as artists 
have loved to paint it. But for the 
after-record of Scriptures, we should 
have no reason to suppose that this 
child differed in any respect from or- 
dinary children. 

1228. The Education of Jesus. — 
The New Testament is an outburst of 
new leaves and blossoms from solid 
wood of the Old Testament ; and we 
ought never to forget that he whom 
we worship above all others was a 
Jew, trained in all the lore of the Old 
Testament. There is not aline which 
we trace on which his eye has not lin- 
gered. Not only the Prophecies with 
their thunders, and the Psalms with 
their sweet influences, and the Histor- 
ies with their instructions, but the in- 
stitutions, as well, of the old Hebrews, 
were the subject-matter of Christ's 
education in his childhood and in his 
manhood ; and are all these things to 
be disengaged and set afloat and lost 
to us ? It is squandering treasure to 
set aside the Old Testament. 

1229. Youthful Eclipse of Christ. — 
At twelve years of age Jesus appears 
at the Temple, but besides that, for 
nearly thirty years, there was hardly a 
word or syllable heard of him. 

To those who think that Christ was 
but a man this may not seem strange ; 
but to us who hold that he was God 



JESUS CHRIST 



265 



manifest in the flesh ; to us who hold 
that he bore divinity from the throne 
to the footstool, for the illumination of 
the race, this long eclipse seems, or 
may seem, strange. It may seem 
strange that he should pass through 
those stages of development which 
belong to men. But if we judge, not 
by ^theory but by facts, as they oc- 
curred, was it not the purpose of God 
that he should become a man, not 
merely standing in man's lot, but 
through that long process of evolution 
and self-consecration which belongs to 
the race ; that he should taste child- 
hood and youth and early manhood ; 
that he should go through the various 
steps of intellectual development which 
are common to men ; that his soul 
should be opened up by the same 
method that man's is ? 

1230. John the Baptist and Jesus 

Philosophically, they stood opposed to 
each other. John stood saying to the 
animal in man, "Down! Down!" 
and left all the rest untouched ; but 
Christ said to all that is angelic in 
man, " Rise up, and control yourself, 
your appetites and your passions." It 
was to the secular that John spoke. It 
was to the immortal that Jesus spoke. 
One dealt by fear ; the other by hope. 
One dealt by conscience ; the other by 
faith and love. 

1 23 1. The Tempter.— That fatal 
taint has corrupted the popular idea of 
Satan to this day. He is not a mighty 
spirit, but a sooty monster, an infernal 
vampire, a heathen Gorgon. . . . 

Not such was the great Tempter of 
the wilderness. He might well have 
risen upon the Saviour's sight as fair 
as when, after a stormy night, the 
morning star dawns from the east upon 
the mariner, — " an angel of light." To 
suppose that there could be any temp- 
tation experienced by Jesus at the 
sohcitation of such a Devil as has 



been pictured by the imaginations of 
monks, is to degrade him to the level 
of the lowest natures. In this ecstatic 
vision we may suppose that there 
arose upon the Saviour's imagination 
the grandest conception of reason and 
of wisdom. It was not meant to 
seem a temptation, but only a rational 
persuasion. It was the Spirit of this 
Worid soliciting Jesus to employ that 
Divine power which now began to 
effulge in him, for secular and phys- 
ical, rather than for moral and spiritual 
ends. It was, if one might so say, the 
whole selfish spirit of time and history 
pleading that Jesus should work upon 
matter and for the flesh, rather than 
upon the soul and for the spirit. 

1232. Christ's Works of Mercy. — 
The miracles of Christ cannot be 
taken out of their life-connections and 
analyzed by themselves. They were 
to his teaching what gestures are to an 
orator, that go with his thoughts, and 
taken alone are of no value. As in 
the moods of love, the eye, the Hp, 
the face, have expressions that cannot 
be separated from the emotions which 
produce them, so was it with Christ's 
works of mercy. 

1233. The Disciples of Jesus. — 
When Christ gathered his followers, 
he selected them from the humbler 
walks of life. We scarcely can doubt 
his reason. An old and richly culti- 
vated farm may perhaps be more easy 
to till, but it is more likely to be filled 
with weeds than the virgin soil ; and 
if the people were to receive the new 
and higher doctrines, it was much 
more likely that a simple band of men 
such as fishermen would receive them 
like little children than that the proud, 
scholarly, conceited men of Jerusalem 
would ; and he would have had to 
contest first with his own disciples had 
he chosen them from among the higher 
classes. 



266 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



1234. The Look of Jesus. — Nothing 
seems to have impressed the disciples 
more than the look which, under ex- 
citement, Jesus had the power of 
giving. It is mentioned unconsciously, 
as a force which they had felt, rather 
than as a thing which they had ob- 
served. Elvery feature in some faces, 
when kindled from within, is a tongue, 
— more than a tongue, which is feeble 
and unrich to express the deepest 
emotions, the subtile, the complex, 
and the sudden and evanescent. But 
the face may, like an opal, flash 
mingled colors which the cunningest 
brush cannot catch or keep. We re- 
call our friends more by their looks 
than by their words. It is the look at 
meeting, or the look at parting, or the 
expression at some moment of high 
discourse, that the memory catches, 
and fixes as an ineffaceable picture. 
In old age, when form, and words, 
and all the personality besides, have 
by distance grown dim as clouds on 
the horizon, certain sudden radiant 
looks yet float and vibrate as faint 
lightnings do in those same evening 
summer clouds. 

1235. "As a Little Child." — It is 
the simplicity of trust, it is the con- 
fiding of love, it is the entire absence of 
calculation or design, that pleases you. 
The child is unconsciously an in- 
terpreter of men's faces ; but it never 
sits down to think what a man means. 
And it is this unconscious trust and 
simplicity of love that not only pleases 
you, but pleased Christ, and that made 
him more royal, with his lap and 
bosom full of clambering children, than 
ever was Oriental monarch amidst 
prostrate nobles and servants. And I 
would rather have seen Christ with a 
lap full of children than with scepter 
and crown in the New Jerusalem. 

1236. Jesus' Love of Retirement. — 
Not only do we find Jesus disen- 



tangling himself from the throng 
of curious hearers, and going apart 
with his disciples, but even from 
them he seemed often to draw away 
into the refreshment of absolute soli- 
tude. As the coolness of night is 
poured upon flowers overspent with 
the glow and heat of the day, so in 
solitude the soul of Jesus opened to the 
great heavens above him, and was 
comforted and calmed into peace. 

1237. The Impersonality of Jesus. — 
If this reticence of the Evangelists 
arises from their peculiarly unliterary 
and non-historic genius, it is not un- 
becoming to the nature of Jesus. 
There was never so impersonal a per- 
son as he. Although to an extraordi- 
nary degree full of outward life and 
action, yet there was something in the 
elevation of his nature which abstracts 
our thoughts from the outward form 
of his life. As in the presence of a 
great picture we forget the canvas, 
the paint, and the brush, and think 
only of the events and objects them- 
selves ; so Jesus leaves upon our 
minds the impression not of the jour- 
neys, the acts, the words even, but of 
the temper, the nobility of soul, the 
universal truths of his life and teach- 
ings. He detaches himself from the 
world in which he lived and through 
which he acted, as the perfume of 
fragrant )vines abandons the flowers 
in which it was distilled and fills the 
air. 

1238. The Simple and the Mystical, 
in Jesus. — We see in this conversation 
[with the woman of Samaria] again the 
very same subtile play of thought be- 
tween the material and its spiritual 
counterpart which was shown in the 
conversations with Nicodemus and 
with the questioners in the Temple. 
Jesus seems like one who thought on 
two different planes. He recognized 
the qualities and the substance of this 



JESUS CHRIST 



267 



world as they appeared to his follow- 
ers, while their outcome and value 
and meaning in the spiritual life was 
his real and inner interpretation of 
them. This doubleness we often see 
in parents, or in benevolent teachers 
of children, who go along with the 
child's understanding, and yet per- 
ceive that things are not as the child 
thinks them to be, and their conscious- 
ness plays back and forth between 
the child's imperfect sense of truth 
and their own truer judgment of re- 
ality. 

1239. The Teaching of Jesus. — 
The discourses of Jesus grew deeper 
and richer from the beginning of his 
ministry to the end. But the transi- 
tions were never formal or abrupt. 
Nor can we anywhere lay our finger 
upon a precise moment or occasion 
when the deepening or widening took 
place. His teaching was like the flow 
of a river, whose depth and breadth 
continually increase, but nowhere sud- 
denly. 

1240. Necessity of Diluting Truth. 
— The profoundest Teacher of history ; 
the first, and by all odds the greatest 
Preacher of the world, who drew and 
maintained the largest congregation, 
till neither hoiise nor temple nor street 
could hold them, had the fewest ad- 
herents, and, in one sense, was the 
least successful of men. It was nec- 
essary that in some sense the truth 
should be diluted. As men mix 
strong wines with diluent water, for 
those that are to be benefited in health 
by them, so it needed more of the 
human element, such as existed in the 
Apostles and in the primitive teachers, 
for immediately permanent effect. 

1 241. "He Knew What Was in 
Man." — In order to be a good violin- 
ist I do not need to play every tune : 
I simply need to know each string, 
and what its possible combinations 



are, and how to make them ; and al- 
though our Saviour did not go through 
all the various phases of experience 
which men go through, his education 
in the knowledge of humanity was 
perfect. 

1242. Radicalism of Christ. — Christ 
was the first and the sublime radical. 
"Now also," says the New Testament, 
speaking of the coming of Christ, " the 
axe is laid unto the root of the trees." 
What is radical but a word derived 
from radix, which means root ? He 
was a root-man. He came right at 
the worm at the root of the trees. A 
physician that, instead of attempting 
to palliate a difficulty, deals sharply 
with the organic lesion, is a radical. 
In morals, the man that does not at- 
tempt to smooth over the surface, but 
attacks the fundamental cause of 
wrong, is a radical. Christ, then, was 
a radical. 

1243. Hebraism and Christ. — The 
old Jewish law had its secret spirit ; 
but it was hidden in a vast system of 
forms. That spirit broke out in Christ 
Jesus in a living exposition of itself. 
In winter there is scarcely a thing that 
is more homely than an apple-tree ; 
but in May, Avhen it is covered with 
blossoms, is there anything more ex- 
quisite than that same tree ? That 
tree in winter is the old Jewish law. 
Christ is the old Jewish law all blos- 
somed and coming to fruit. 

1244. Failure of the Law. — Oh, 
how many, how many a child, firm 
and obstinate and proud, has refused 
confession or concession ; and the fa- 
ther's authority and scowl might si- 
lence him, only to wake in him the 
fires of hell. But a mother's tears 
and tremulous lips and words, break- 
ing down, "Oh, my son!" bring 
tears in a moment from him and he 
throws himself into her arms. Love 
could conquer what authority could 



268 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



not, nor a threat. And the love of 
God in Christ Jesus is the salvation of 
the world, because it is adapted ex- 
actly to that nature in man that can 
be persuaded, but cannot be driven. 

1245. Christ's Judgments, Interior 
not Exterior.— See how Jesus took by 
the hand of sympathy the poor fam- 
ished, shriveled widow, as the old 
rich fellows were rolling their gold 
and silver down the copper vase of the 
Temple that received it, so that they 
saw it go in, and heard it rattle all the 
way down. The only thing that 
seemed to arrest the eye of Christ was 
this poor little shriveled, shrunk, and 
shivering widow that came and had 
with her two mites. He could not 
see them, they were so small. They 
made a farthing. There was not a 
tinkle; but he heard it. He called 
his disciples to him, and said : " She 
has given more than they all ; they 
have given of their abundance ; she 
of her penury has given her whole 
Uving." 

1246. The Transfiguration. — There 
appeared also Moses and Ehas. Why 
they? Why not angels? Why not, 
as at Christ's temptation, and at his 
baptism, personages of celestial origin ? 
You are to remember that the old dis- 
pensation was about to cease in power 
for the sake of giving place to the 
new. That is to say, as the blossom 
falls in order that the fruit may swell 
under it, and be better than the blos- 
som, so the old dispensation was the 
blessed flower of ages from which has 
come the noblest fruit that the world 
ever saw : it was fit that there should 
be witnesses from the old dispensa- 
tion ; and there were not two names 
belonging to that dispensation which 
were more illustrious than those of 
Moses and Elias, or Elijah — the He- 
brew name is stronger than the Greek. 
Moses was the grandest lawgiver, and 



Elijah was the noblest prophet and re- 
former, of his time. They stood mag- 
nificent as the pyramids of Egypt. 

1247. Death of Jesus Foreknown by 
Him. — As astronomers know, when 
none others think of it, that traveling 
through the heavens the vast shadow 
is progressing towards the sun which 
ere long shall clothe it and hide it, so 
Christ foresaw the great darkness 
which was to overwhelm him. 

1248. Bearing, but Not Overborne, 
— The earlier and more noble and gen- 
uine painters represented Christ erect, 
and almost triumphant, and moving 
with his cross upon his shoulder as if 
he had already triumphed over it, as 
if to illustrate the apostle's description 
— " Who, for the joy that was set be- 
fore him, endured the cross, despising 
the shame." 

But in the Mediaeval age theology 
lost the inexpressible sweetness of the 
Evangehst — the simplicity which seems 
to have been the reflex of Christ's in- 
fluence upon his own times in the Gos- 
pel. The Roman — that is, the Tuscan 
— gloom, spread, and the sufferings 
of Christ began to fill the whole hori- 
zon. And now art began to fall un- 
consciously from Christ's divinity to 
the exhibition of that weakness which 
belonged to his body. His face lost 
serenity and became woe-struck. His 
form no longer elate became bent and 
prostrate, as if some mighty oak, up- 
rooted by the gale, had fallen its full 
length along the ground. True art 
represents Christ as bearing his cross. 
Later art represents Christ as overborne 
by his cross. There is a great deal of 
difference in these two ideas, whether 
in picture, or in moral influence. 

1249. The Lower and the Higher 
Courage. — Among the many scenes of 
Scripture I know of none more beauti- 
ful than this resurrection of these two 
men [Joseph of Arimathea, and Nice- 



JESUS CHRIST 



269 



demus, who took the body of Jesus, 
prepared it with spices, and laid it in 
the tomb] into a sublime courage — 
into a quiet heroism in the hour of 
darkness and danger. And if you 
contrast their conduct with that of 
Peter, you shall see a living distinction 
between physical courage and moral 
courage. Peter was impetuous, bold 
to confront visible danger, forward to 
own his discipleship while his Master 
was with him ; but when left to him- 
self he shrunk, lost heart, fell into vac- 
illation, and became timid, and even 
false to himself and false to his Mas- 
ter. Danger paralyzed good in him. 

Joseph, while times were safe, mused 
and hesitated. But danger aroused 
and brought out his hidden nature. 
All his wealth was spurned ; his hon- 
orable position was forgotten ; and he 
followed, boldly, the impulses of his 
heart, when others quailed. 

It is not to be forgotten that the only 
two men that had the daring to disclose 
their love for Christ after his death, 
and at the very height of his enemies' 
triumph, were the two timid men who 
had been secret in their discipleship 
through all his life. 

1250. Jesus in the Tomb — And 
yet, while that garden held the sepul- 
cher, and the women sat watching it, 
and saw only darkness and desolation, 
how blind they were ! When first all 
was a bright certainty, how little then 
did they know ! And when after- 
wards, all was dark woe, how little yet 
did they know ! The darkness and 
the light were both alike to them, for 
they were ignorant alike of both. Of 
all the garden, only the rock itself was 
a true soil, for in it lay the " root of 
David." Forth from that unlikely 
spot should come a flower whose blos- 
som would restore Eden to the world ; 
for if a garden saw man's fall, forth 
from the garden came his life again. 



1 25 1 . Resurrection of Jesus. — Long 
before men came forth to work ; be- 
fore the air was burdened with noises ; 
just as the first tentative notes of wak- 
ing birds began to be heard ; while the 
leaf unshaken was yet loaded with 
dew ; while nature was cool, and pure, 
and tender, as if newly made — in this 
early morning hour it was, that Christ 
came forth into newness of life from 
the sepulcher. I never stand in a 
summer's morning before the sun 
dawns, long before waked by birds, to 
look out upon the yet dim and dusky 
landscape, that I do not think, " this 
is the hour of resurrection." As the 
night held the day, but could not long 
hold it, and unclasped its dark arms 
to let forth the morning again, so every 
day, to them that have an imagination 
therefor, is a resurrection day, and 
sets forth all these most noble and 
beauteous features in nature, and sym- 
bolizes forever and forever the rising 
of our Master. 

1252. Easter Sunday. — This day is 
one of universal jubilee. Since the 
sun this morning began its course, 
people of all the earth eastward have 
in succession sprung forth with songs 
and gratulations. We stand in the 
midst of a great choral company ; and 
the world now, to God's ear, if not to 
ours, is one great chant. And, swing- 
ing in its circuit, the orb carries all 
Christians ; and, in succession, more 
and more as the sun rolls westward, 
they sing forth their gladness and their 
praise for this day, and the truths it 
commemorates. Those who are agreed 
in nothing else, have met together in 
this common joy — the coming of Christ 
from the dead. It is the opening of 
the door of the future to the faithful, 
and the gladness of the whole human 
family to whom the Gospel is preached. 
It is the first step in the life of immor- 
tality. 



270 



RELIGIOUS LIFP: 



1253. The Crucifixion, the Tomb, 
the Resurrection. — As we read this 
connected history, it seems as though 
the crucifixion was like one of those 
summer thunder-storms in which all 
the heavens appear to be full of dark- 
ness, and conflict, and turmoil. The 
terrible thunder-cracks that roll 
through the darkness ; the great striv- 
ing winds that now tug at the trees 
which groan under their hands, and 
that now beat on the house ; the 
hissing rain ; all the wild commotion 
of the elements, — these fill the soul 
full of imaginations and strange ter- 
rors. And yet we sleep, and wake, 
and sleep ; and when the morning 
comes there is not a cloud in the air. 
It is as if the heavens were one vast 
bowl, or goblet, filled with the wine 
of life. And the sun seems steeping 
the very heavens. Not a leaf moves 
except when a drop of water falls from 
it and changes its equipoise. And all 
the birds sing, and all voices seem 
jubilant, and all the earth seems re- 
freshed and more beautiful. And so 
it affects us when we read of the 
tumult of the crucifixion on Calvary, 
and the after quiet. 

1254. Jesus at Emmaus. — There is 
an exquisite touch, too, in the scene at 
the gate, where it is said, " He made 
as though he would have gone 
further," which some have stumbled 
at, supposing that it was a ruse or 
trick — a gentle pretence to secure en- 
treaty. Such persons cannot under- 
stand the niceties of the finer and the 
higher feehngs. Doubtless he would 
have gone on, had they not let out 
their hearts on him, and constrained 
him to enter. Nothing is so sensitive 
as love — and the greater, the more sen- 
sitive. It cannot endure indifference. 
It needs to be wanted. Like a lamp, 
it needs to be fed from the oil of an- 
other's heart, or its flame burns low. 



1255. Limitations of God in Christ. 
— I believe that Christ is God manifest 
in the flesh. Is the whole of God in 
Christ ? Well, that is asking me, Can 
infinity be inclosed in the finite? 
Christ, when he came under the limi- 
tations of time and space and flesh 
was limited by them. If you go down 
into the Five Points to talk with rough 
men, you lay aside at home two-thirds 
of that which is best in you. You 
cannot bring it before such persons. 
You are limited by the condition of 
their minds. In other words, it is 
quite possible that even God, though 
I know not how, should manifest him- 
self under limitations at times. 

1256. The Christian Conception of 
Deity. — According to pagan mythol- 
ogy, gods have descended for their 
own selfish lusts and pleasure ; but 
the highest, the noblest, conception 
that men have ever formed of divinity 
is that of God, incarnate, ranking 
himself with the lowest and poorest, 
that he might lift up mankind from 
the very bottom by his example, in- 
spiration, and divine power. And how 
beautiful was his life ! How, in all 
the realm of life, was he spotless ! 

1257. The Historic Christ of God. — 
If the teachings and the life of Christ 
translate to us the Father who sent 
him, and from whose bosom he came, 
they do this in a way that meets 
human infirmity exactly, and becomes 
a substitute for all institutional forms, 
all symbols, all rituals. Symbols and 
rituals are meant to be like the rounds 
of a ladder, by which a man can go 
from the lower story to the higher ; 
but if there be one grand symbol or 
ritual, one great exposition, that is 
within the reach of the high and the 
low, of the ignorant and the most 
experienced, it becomes a glorious 
substitute for all these collateral 
helps. 



JESUS CHRIST 



271 



1258. Influence of Christ. — Christ 
did but little. The immediate produc- 
tive force of his life was very small. 
What he stands for is dependent on 
what he was. He was a picture 
brought down from the gallery above, 
where men cannot discern, framed, 
and hung in the air, as it were, for the 
looking of all mankind. Though 
Christ did little, he was large ; and he 
continues before the sight of men. . . . 
The symbol of his majesty and beauty 
has not been taken down. The waves 
of revolution have rolled over empires, 
and they have gone under ; but that 
symbol has not gone under. The 
very iron-sandaled Roman govern- 
ment that destroyed his outward form 
has gone lifelessly into the dust ; but 
had it power to slay him ? No. It 
had power to take away his body, but 
it left his picture and his spirit in the 
air. Revolutions have swept over the 
schools of thought ; but no school of 
thought has ever yet been able to take 
out of the world this vision of God as 
made manifest in the lovely life of 
Jesus Christ. Vast corruptions have 
entered into the Church ; the Church 
has been at times even perverted into 
a temple of the devil ; and theology 
has been ransacked, and has been 
found to contain all forms that are de- 
testable to God, and that should be 
detestable to men ; but all the defec- 
tions of faith and behef have not been 
able to touch the sweet face of Christ 
that still shines out of the air. 

1259. Abiding Influence of Christ. — 
Friends are separated. They go 
apart. Half the distance around the 
world they are asunder for years. 
But faithful hearts never grow cold ; 
and the vision never grows dim. And 
influences are as abiding ; as, for in- 
stance, the mother's influence over the 
child, or the father's influence over 
the son, or the husband's and the 



wife's influence respectively over each 
other, or the influence of heroic na- 
tures over those who by enthusiasm 
have been gathered around them. 

The power of Goethe, of Shakes- 
peare, of far-off but unforgotten Plato, 
the power of great natures all the 
world over, abides, and men gather 
about them. Schools are still formed 
about philosophers and dramatists. 
And is it a difficult thing for us to 
form schools around about the central 
person of Jesus Christ, who is God 
represented to us in that specialty of 
manifestation which enables him to 
treat with the weak, with the wicked, 
with those that are out of the way ? 

1260. The Name Above Every 
Name. — As Raphael's history con- 
nects him with the most exquisite 
things in art ; as Caesar's name con- 
nects him with the most efficient things 
in military life ; as Michael Angelo's 
skill with the chisel connects him with 
the noblest conceptions which man 
has formed of statuary ; as many a 
thinker is connected, by reason of his 
relations and investigations in the 
sphere of philosophy and thought with 
the brightest achievements of human 
genius, so, when we behold at last the 
full personality of the Lord Jesus 
Christ, he will be One of such moral 
relations, and his history will be found 
to have so associated itself with every- 
thing that is most resplendent in intel- 
lectual thought, and research, and 
execution, and combination, and cre- 
ative force, that that which is the 
noblest, and most transcendent in 
truth, in honor, in sublime faith, in 
self-denial, in meekness, in humility, 
will be embraced therein, and that his 
name will be verily the Name above 
every name. 

1 261. Christ the Only Standard. — 
No man can afford to set his chro- 
nometer by anything except the sun. 



272 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



When he has done this he knows the 
exact time, and can be certain of the 
correctness of his calcuhitions, and 
make a safe voyage. And when a 
man is making a voyage, not across 
the Atlantic or the Pacific, but across 
the sea of hfe, and is steering for the 
port of eternal happiness or woe, he 
cannot afford to set his conscience by 
the conscience of every man that he 
happens to meet ; he must set it by 
the Sun of Righteousness, 

1262. Practical Use of Christ. — 
When I need a surgeon to deliver me 
from the effects of some injury, if he 
comes accredited as a skillful man in 
his profession, I do not ask where he 
graduated, how he got his skill, or 
anything of that kind : I take him for 
his services, and his known skill is the 
ground on which I take him. If I 
were lost in a forest, and I came across 
an old trapper who said, " I have 
lived here for forty years, and I can 
lead you out of these woods," I should 
instantly accept him as my guide, 
without any further knowledge of him 
or of his life, because I was lost, and 
here was a man that I presumptively 
knew could save me. But when we 
need Christ do we go to him day by 
day for that which we need, and for 
which he offers him.self ? 

1263. Experience Fashions Our 
Ideal of Christ. — The interior and sub- 
jective Christ must be wrought out by 
life. Our thoughts must live with him 
in all moods and experiences. As the 
vine, clasping the living tree, creeps 
along its branches, roots itself in the 
crevices of the bark, and forms itself 
upon its shape, so in all the various re- 
lations of life our thought of Christ, 
following our experiences, should 
fashion and form itself. 

1264. The Personal Saviour. — As 
the outer world reveals to a poet what 
it does not to the practical man ; as 



love reveals affections to some that 
others, who are of a slender well of 
love, never know ; so the measure of a 
man's own nature will determine very 
much the magnitude, the richness and 
the power of the vision of Christ, 
which he carries out. Every man 
may have, according to the limit of 
his nature, a personal Saviour, and 
know it, rejoice in it, and live by it. 

1265. Power of Christ. — How well 
things ripen if the sun will only shine : 
but when the sun is laggard ; when, in 
June, the eastern winds prevail, and 
there are dribbling, grumbling show- 
ers, the strawberries will not hasten ; 
they swell, and are vapid or sour. 
Yet as soon as the sun wakes up, and 
drives away the clouds, and comes 
forth, pouring the effulgence of its 
beams on all below, out of its light 
and heat come sugar, color and fra- 
grant odors. Then the strawberries 
ripen, and all the region round about 
matures. Without the sun, a few 
things could be ripened in the green- 
house ; but you cannot have a green- 
house for all the world. A few men 
could be ripened in the synagogue, or 
in the Temple ; but now the Sun of 
Righteousness has arisen upon all the 
earth, and whosoever in any nation 
will fear God, and do justly, and love 
mercy, is living by faith of God, which 
is faith of Jesus Christ. 

1266. The Soul's Image of Christ. — 
The perfect interpreter, the great 
schoolmaster of the soul, is the imagi- 
nation, which the New Testament 
calls, as applied to religious things, 
invisible qualities and beings, " faith." 
There are a thousand ideas that may 
be called fancies, like bubbles that 
come up for a moment and burst. 
Though they had a picture in them 
that no art could copy, they have 
burst and are gone. Men in musings 
and religious feelings in life may have 



JESUS CHRIST 



273 



ten thousand that will not abide, and 
may seem to the uncritical or over- 
critical judgment (which is just the 
same) mere foolishness ; but they are 
necessary parts of that gradual proc- 
ess by which you come to your sub- 
stantial thought of the Christ. 

1267. Jesus the Polar Star. — As the 
oppressed were wont, not many years 
ago, to seek liberty in the night, be- 
holding the star in the north, not 
knowing what it was, nor how it was 
made, but following it, so may we 
look away to the light that shines in 
Jesus, not seeking to analyze it, nor to 
know all that is in it, nor to ascertain 
what it means, but following it to 
spiritual life and to liberty. 

1268. Christ's Mediatorship. — In 
foreign courts we have ministers and 
ambassadors to intercede for us. They 
are mediators ; they are intercessors. 
There is an unacquaintance, a strange- 
ness, in foreign courts, of the affairs of 
another people, either from attending 
to their own business, or some other 
cause, and hence the necessity of our 
sending ambassadors to them. But 
it cannot be supposed that there is any 
such ignorance of our affairs in the 
mind of God. You must drop all 
such idea of the intercessorship of 
Christ as that he is one to convey in- 
formation, to adjust facts, or to make 
things clearer in the divine mind than 
they were already. His mediatorship 
affects us, not God. 

1269. Gratitude to Christ. — If a poor 
child should meet me in the street with 
a broken and withered flower, I should 
see the child's heart, not the condition 
of the flower, and should thank the 
child, and should feel a strange fra- 
grance, not from the flower itself, but 
from the thought that he wanted to do 
me a kindness ; and the poorer he was, 
the more I should feel it, and be touched 
by the tenderness of the offering. 



Ah ! when Christ takes his own 
heart, broken, wounded, bleeding, his 
sacrifice and his love, and brings it to 
us, and makes it a present ; when out 
of his own misery, out of his own 
degradation, and out of his own 
suffering, he proposes to lift us up into 
everlasting bounty and benefit, is 
there no requital, are there no thanks, 
is there no gratitude due? 

1270, Fashioned by Christ. — If you 
were to ask an exquisite vase, " Where 
did you come from?" if it could 
speak it would reply, " From a bank 
of clay." " What were you there? " 
" A formless handful of dirt." " How 
came you to be what you are ? " "It 
was by the taste of him that fashioned 
me that I grew to this form. He saw 
me when I was but a handful of clay, 
and he put me on a revolving wheel, 
and he laid his hands upon me, and 
they moved to thoughts beautiful, and 
I, whirling and wrought upon by his 
skill, gradually grew to these graceful 
lines. It was his hand that laid the 
pigments on. It was his hand that 
put me in the fiery furnace which 
burned in these colors till they never 
can be taken out again. By the taste 
of my artist-master I am what I am." 

Christ, as revealed to me, is one 
who took me from the dirt, and put 
me on the whirling wheel of his provi- 
dence, and laid his gracious hands 
upon me, and so fashioned me that 
by and by I shall be able to say, " I^y 
the grace of the Lover I am what I 
am." 

1 27 1. Knowledge of Christ. — Tell 
me that it is an impossible thing for a 
man to love the Lord Jesus Christ, 
who is invisible ! You might as well, 
if I were now to go forth beneath tlie 
glorious sun, and its rays were to fall 
down through the air upon me and 
about me on every side, tell me there 
was no sun ! Councils of owls and 



274 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



bats may come to me, under the name 
of pliilosoplicrs, and say, " Do you 
not tliink tliat all these which you are 
talking about — rays of the sun, flow- 
ers, singing-birds, curling smoke, and 
the like — are a delusion ? We have 
lived almost as long as you have, and 
we have consulted the oldest owls and 
bats, and we do not believe in those 
things." Yet, I know, — whatever men 
may say, in the low places and the 
high places of life, — I know that there 
is such a thing as loving Jesus Christ 
as a friend, as a brother ; and that 
there is no other love that is so sweet, 
so deep, so lasting, so wondrous, as 
that which the soul can bear towards 
him. 

1272. "As a Hen Gathereth Her 
Chickens," — I have on my farm one 
hen that has twenty chickens, and 
several that have from twelve to fifteen 
each. All together, I have some two 
hundred chickens running about up 
there ; and I have seen the brooding 
process in all its stages. Simply as a 
feature of natural history, it is ex- 
tremely interesting ; but it is interest- 
ing to me also because it reminds me 
of the words of Christ which I have 
quoted. I like to look at those things 
which God has laid his hand on in the 
Bible, and stained through with famil- 
iar truths. 

The hen diligently hunts after food 
for her little flock ; and if as she 
scratches, she sees a most tempting 
worm, it is not for her, but for her 
chickens. She forgets herself in car- 
ing for them. The moment they be- 
gin to be tired, she seems to know it, 
and seeks a corner where the wind 
does not blow, and settles down, ex- 
panding her wings. And one after 
another the little wretches come run- 
ning to her and nestle under her. And 
then come their little peeps, and her 
cooing. It is the very spirit of domes- 



ticity that the scene exhibits. And I 
never see it that I am not reminded 
of the tenderness and love which 
Christ manifested towards his enemies 
— towards those that he knew were 
about to shed his blood, when he said, 
" How often would I have gathered 
thy children together, even as a hen 
gathereth her chickens under her 
wings, and ye would not ! " 

1273. " Through Jesus Christ, Our 
Lord." — As after a storm-tossed voy- 
age, when more favoring winds spring 
up, and the keel quickly threads the 
channel, and the vessel rushes in, and 
casts anchor in the tranquil bay of 
New York, and there swings like a 
cradle, and all thank God that the 
trouble is past, and that they are at 
home at length, so I tossed long, suf- 
fering much, in reading God's revel- 
ation in nature, and God's revelation 
in his holy Word, and comparing 
them, as I sought to do, with all the 
fundamental elements of knowledge. 
It was not until after suffering long 
that I entered into the spirit of the 
eighth chapter of Romans and my 
ship was at anchor. 

1274. The Peaceful Presence of 
Jesus. — When one who is thoroughly 
agreeable, genial, and affectionate, 
comes to our house, and enters in, it 
makes no more disturbance than a 
fine thread makes in going through a 
fine cambric needle. It does not in- 
terrupt the course of things any more 
than the sunlight does in coming in at 
the window, any more than the dawn 
of the morning does, which carries no 
disturbance where it goes. There are 
friends that come and go, bringing 
and leaving a fragrant, blessed joyful- 
ness. And such is Jesus, whose com- 
ing brings peace. 

1275. Salvation Through Christ. — 
Do you suppose the ferryboats are 
jealous of your crossing the river in 



JESUS CHRIST 



275 



any other way than by them ? When 
you have tried to jump, or wade, or 
swim, or make a bridge of your own, 
I think you will be quite willing to go 
by the ferryboats. And do you sup- 
pose that God is jealous of your com- 
ing to him in any other way than by 
faith in Jesus Christ ? He will not in- 
sist upon your coming in that way, if 
you have power to come in any other. 
If by your own will you can control 
your passions, and force the fire of 
purity through the passages of your 
soul ; if you have that in you by 
which, when you go forth and engage 
in the affairs of life, you can do right, 
and that continually, he will not ob- 
ject to your relying upon yourself. 
But if you find that you cannot with- 
stand the forces that are arrayed 
against you ; if, having tried again 
and again to triumph by your own 
strength, you say, "The work of re- 
generating my character is greater 
than I can perform alone," then look 
up! Christ be thanked for being our 
Pilot : a pilot goes to steer for those 
that cannot steer for themselves. 
Christ be thanked for being our Cap- 
tain : a captain goes to lead those that 
cannot do without a leader. 

1276. The Captain of Our Salva- 
tion. — Our Leader ! Oh, how men 
fight under a great leader ! When 
some Wellington, or some Sherman, 
or some Grant comes to the front, how 
men's hearts go out in courage, and 
how they say, " Now, it is worth our 
while to be soldiers!" With what 
alacrity they obey him, going where 
they are sent, and doing what they are 
commanded to do ! And they are in- 
spired by the thought that they will 
be participators of his glory — for what 
the army does that is noble glorifies 
the general, and what the general does 
that is noble glorifies the lowest soldier 
in the army. 



Now, our Captain has been made 
perfect through suffering. He knows 
every experience to which we are li- 
able, having passed through the vari- 
ous phases of earthly life ; and now 
he has risen to the source of power 
above, to the headquarters of men in 
this warring condition, where he sits 
at the right hand of God ; and he is 
our Leader. 

1277. Love-Tokens to Christ. — 
There comes a letter to a maiden in 
her father's dwelling ; and, on open- 
ing it, she finds simply a little sprig of 
forget-me-not. It has come from a 
great distance. She knows who sent 
it. To him she has given all that she 
has to give — life and love : and in him 
her whole future is bound up. There 
is nothing in it but a bit of paper, and 
this little sprig of dry forget-me-not. 
That is all, — and that is enough. 

If I can pluck the smallest leaf, if I 
can lift up and send before Christ the 
poorest creature that lives, as a love- 
token, he will know it ; I know that 
he will know it ; and great is my 
happiness that I am able thus to show 
my love for him. 

1278. The Ever-Present Christ. — 
When a friend, much beloved, comes 
to you and asks a favor, if it be within 
your power you will grant it. And 
when you are afar off, and a letter 
comes to you in his known and fa- 
miliar hand, asking the same favor, it 
is as if he himself were at your side. 

Strange power ! mysterious incan- 
tation ! When you take that sheet of 
paper, with those lines crossing it, 
what portraits instantly shine out! 
You see the face of the mother, or the 
father, or the brother, or the sister, or 
the lover. While you read the letter, 
you do not seem to be looking at the 
written words half so much as into the 
face of the one that wrote them ! 
You see the eye, the changing ex- 



276 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



pressions, or some one expression 
which the mind loves to Unger upon. 
You call up not only the face and the 
form, but much of the past history. 
And while reading the request, how 
much beside does the mute paper ad- 
dress to your imagination ! 

If Christ were to come to his dis- 
ciples in person, that would be occa- 
sion for their watching. But the word 
of Christ is with us, the cause of 
Christ is with us, and that is as if he 
himself were with us. 

1279. Convincing Beauty of the 
Christ-Life. — The grandest sight on 
this earth is not the march of the all- 
conquering storm whose cloudy bat- 
tahons go rushing through the sound- 
ing heavens ; the most beautiful thing 
on earth is not the garden which 
opens and sends forth from its censers 
fragrance ; it is not the stateliness of 
the tree which you sit under through 
the long summer's day ; those are not 
the most beautiful things on earth that 
art carves out of stone. The beauty 
of the soul, that lies in its secret cham- 
bers ; the rich, deep, just and loving 
natures — these are the beautiful things 
of this world. There is nothmg so 
beautiful as Christ in men ; and when 
one begins to reflect the nature of 
Christ in his life, religion needs no 
apology ; there is no call for argu- 
ment. 

1280. Our Need, Christ's Motive. — 
Do I, when I open my house as a 
refuge for orphans, require that they 
should be perfectly clean before 
I take them in ? No ; the dirtiest 
ones I take first. Do I require that 
they should be well clothed ? No ; 
their very rags are their invitation. 
The reason I take them in is because 
I am benevolent, and they are needy. 
And the reason that Christ accepts us 
is because he loves us, and we are in 
need of his loving-kindness. 



1 281. The Divinity of Christ. — 
Men want to know whether Christ is 
divine, and they test him as a chemist 
would test the quality of any sub- 
stance. They, as it were, take a pair 
of scales, and throw one text on this 
side, and one in that side ; and then 
they throw another on this side, and 
another in that side ; and then they 
say, " If I had one more text for this 
side, I think divinity would weigh 
down the other side." And they hunt 
for another text. And so they try to 
estimate the divinity of Christ as 
though it were a ponderable element. 
But it is not magnitude that is divinity. 
That which is distinctive, that which 
crowns universal sovereignty, is the 
crown of love. That which we see in 
the Lord Jesus Christ specialized for 
the wants of this world, was not that 
which made him different from the 
Father, but was simply a manifesta- 
tion of the Father — a section, an 
hour, as it were, let down, — one single 
transaction, as an exposition of what 
is going on in heaven from eternity 
to eternity, by a Love which legislates, 
and works, and serves. 

1282. Forgiving and Punishing. — 
" Do you mean to say, then, that the 
moment a man has done you a wrong 
you are to fly to his neck? " Oh, no, 
not necessarily. It may be that the 
manifestation of this feeling would be 
the worst thing for the person. It 
may be that the spirit of love will in- 
spire you to take a course of discipline. 
But that which actuates you must not 
be the hardness of conscience. It 
certainly must not be combativeness, 
with the monkey-cap of conscience on 
it. It must not be hatred. It must 
not be revenge. Nobody has a right 
to chastise till he is in a forgiving 
frame of mind ; till he is conscious 
that his heart is full and surcharged 
with that same love which made Christ 



JESUS CHRIST 



277 



die for sinners while yet they were his 
enemies. 

1283. Preaching Christ Imperfectly. 
— Christian truth is so divine that the 
smallest part of it is radiant of 
heavenly light. One may stand be- 
fore an ample glass, long and broad, 
which reflects the whole figure, and 
the whole room, giving every part in 
proportion and in relation. Break 
that mirror into a thousand fragments, 
and each one of these pieces will give 
back to you your face ; and though the 
amplitude of view and the relations 
of objects are gone, yet the smallest 
fragment, in its nature and uses, is a 
mirror still, and you can see your 
face withal. A full presentation 
of Christ reflects men, time, and im- 
mortality ; but let error shatter the 
celestial glass, and its fragments, re- 
duced in value, do in part some of 
that work which the whole did ; and 
they are precious. 

1284. Christ the Door. — There be 
some who teach us that the earthly 
Church, composed of human beings, 
surrounded with human devices, hu- 
man ordinances, human govern- 
ments, human systems, is the Door. 
Never! Never! Christ is the Door. 
No organization can take his place. 
None can represent him, even. We 
may make use of the Church as we 
make use of a hotel when we are 
traveling home to see father and 
mother ; but no landlord of any hotel 
shall tell me that he is my father, or 
my mother, or that his hotel is my 
home. Churches are God's hotels, 
where travelers put up for the night, 
as it were, and then speed on their 
way home. Christ is the one Door. 
All that pass through that Door are 
of the one church, and belong to him. 

1285. Christ in You. — Everybody 
should have a candle burning in the 
window of his soul-house, that those 



who go by may know that he is a 
child of light. Every heart should be 
illumined by Christ in it, the hope of 
glory. This is the most powerful 
Christ that can be preached to men. 

1286. Outward and Inward Life. 

It is recorded that in the Medieval 
day or even later, in Europe, while 
the Jews were subject to great per- 
secutions and oppressions and rob- 
beries, they lived a squalid outward 
life, but a palatial life in hidden 
quarters. You might follow one of 
them with old gaberdine, stained and 
spotted, and with all the squalor of 
beggary upon him, through by-ways 
foul to the feet and oft'ensive to every 
sense ; and through some narrow lane 
coming to an archway you might turn 
in, as it were, to the entrance of a 
stable. Yet a side door opens out of 
it into an ill-conditioned hall, pestifer- 
ous in odor ; and ascending the steps 
you come to a secret passage, when, 
opening the door you are blinded with 
the brilliance that bursts on you. 
You are in the palace of a prince. 
The walls are covered with adorn- 
ments, and the rarest stuffs hang in 
tapestry. The dishes that bespread 
the table are of silver and gold, and 
the household who hasten to receive 
the home-coming parent and to strip 
off his outward insignia, are them- 
selves arrayed hke king's children. 
There is a great difference between 
the outward man and the home man. 
But this difference is scarcely 
greater than that which is in Paul. 
Outwardly naked, buffeted, with no 
certain dwelling-place, working for his 
living, reviled, as the filth of all things, 
tlie offscouring of the earth ; inwardly, 
living gloriously by the Christ living 
in him. This concentrated life of 
Christ in him changed his identity. 

1287. Coming to Christ. — To come 
to Christ is not like coming to a mag- 



278 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



istrate, in whom the personahty is hid 
behind the official duty . A magistrate 
represents to you the abstraction of 
justice and authority, and not personal 
attributes. He that comes to Christ 
comes to a person, a friend, a re- 
deemer, a lover ; and comes to him 
not as he would come to an argument 
or a philosophical system, or as he 
would come to an abstract embodi- 
ment of justice, as a magistrate. He 
comes as to a companion. 

1288. God's Incarnation in Christ 
not Strange. — That a father should 
send his children away from home to 
school is not strange ; and that God 
should have created a household, and, 
as it were, sent them into this school- 
house world to learn, is not strange. 
That a father should go to see his 
children while they are at school, is 
not strange ; and that God, aside from 
the ordinary visitations of Providence, 
should make himself personally known 
to his earthly children, is not strange. 
That a father, for the sake of his chil- 
dren, should undergo toils, and pains, 
and labors, and sufiferings, and put 
life and name itself in peril, yea, and 
sacrifice them, is not strange, but 
raises him into the category of heroes ; 
and that God, the Father of all, the 
great Lover and Teacher of all, should 
put burdens on himself, that he should 
be visible before us both to represent 
his own love, and to teach us the way 
of duty, that he should suffer, and 
bear, and forbear, and that he should 
lay down life itself, is not strange. 

1289. The Atonement. — To illu- 
strate my own view of the atonement 
in contradistinction to the Church 
view, as it may be called, I can find 
no other illustration that is comparable 
for a moment to parentage. The 
power of a soul to rear, to teach, to 
forgive, to wait for or to restrain, to 
deny, to punish that which it loves 



best of all the world, and for the sake 
of love — I don't know any other 
source from which I can illustrate this 
glorious fact better than from father- 
hood and motherhood. I don't know 
what else is needed. Is any concep- 
tion grander than a revelation of a 
God doing by the universe what a 
glorious mother is doing by her child ? 

1290. Human Side of Atonement. 
— While you are looking at the heav- 
ens to-night, if the clouds should break 
so as to show one star, all the rays of 
light that come to you will be the an- 
titheses of other rays that go in the op- 
posite direction ; and you will see 
those that fall towards you, and will 
not see those that fall away from you. 

Now, it may unquestionably be true 
that the suffering and the death of 
Christ had a work to perform in the 
other direction — towards the divine 
government, towards the spirit land ; 
we accept it as a mere statement. We 
neither probe it nor much understand 
it. But the other part of the truth, 
which is abundantly expounded and 
applied over and over again, and 
brought to our comprehension and 
sympathy — namely, that Christ's suf- 
fering and death were a manifestation 
of God's nature and feeling towards 
us — this we can understand. And 
this part of the atoning work of the 
Lord Jesus Christ is our part, 

1291. Gratitude to Jesus. — Oh, how 
beautiful a thing is sensitive and hon- 
orable gratitude ! There are men 
wlio cannot hear the name of Arnold 
of Rugby spoken without tears, to this 
day, though he has been dead for a 
score of years. Thomas Hughes, 
who has just gone home to England, 
is one of them. 

There are persons who know that if 
they had not been taken by Jesus at 
just such a time, into friendliness and 
love, and been snared in the golden- 



JESUS CHRIST 



279 



meshed web of divine sympathy, and 
been rescued, they would have been 
utterly destroyed. And in regard to 
everything bright and beautiful in 
their experience, to the end of life, 
they will never cease to feel, "I owe 
it all to him." 

1292. Preaching: Individual Con- 
ceptions. — Paul did not preach Christ 
as Peter would. He preached Christ 
as Christ had been revealed to him 
and in him. It was the Pauline con- 
ception of the Lord Jesus Christ that 
Paul preached. You may say that 
Christ is one and the same, and who- 
ever preaches him, it must be sub- 
stantially the same thing. You might 
just as well say that the sun is one 
and the same, and that therefore 
whatever flower shows the sun's work 
must look the same ; but when you 
look at the flowers you will see some 
red, some blue, some yellow, some 
humble, some high, some branching. 
Endless is the work the sun creates ; 
but every one of the things which it 
creates, reflects its power and teaches 
something about it. 

1293. The Second Incarnation. — 
There is no part of the human body 
that is not dominated by the brain. 
It is the controlling center. The 
blood, the nerves, the tissues, the se- 
cretions, the very substance-matter of 
bone and muscle, all are directly, as 
well as indirectly, influenced by the 
nerve-center— the great center of life 
and being. And the whole world is 
yet to be as perfectly controlled by 
the mind and will of Christ, as the hu- 
man body is now controlled by the 
mind and will of the individual. 
Christ is to fill all with himself — all 
governments ; all laws ; all policies 
under the government ; all com- 
mercial and industrial organizations ; 
all societies; all circles; all house- 
holds ; all individuals. All are to be 



filled with the mind, and will, and 
spirit of the Head ; and Christ is to be 
the brain of the whole world. This is 
what I call the second incarnation. 

1294. Working with Christ. — The 
Apostle Paul had a wonderfully popu- 
lous heaven above his head. He be- 
lieved that the heaven was thronged 
with spirit-workers, and that they had 
sympathy with the work. To be ad- 
mitted into such a working company 
was a great thing. 

Every one of you, if you were to 
go to Europe, would wish that you 
had an introduction into the Court of 
Queen Victoria. And if it so hap- 
pened that you were invited to a royal 
reception, you would write home about 
it, and all your friends would know it, 
and you would not forget it to the day 
of your death. Men feel that when 
they are invited to see such a man as 
Humboldt, they are honored. They 
feel that when they are invited to the 
country seats of nobles, they are hon- 
ored. There is a universal feeling of 
this sort. And Paul had it. I do not 
think he felt that King Agrippa had 
anything to give him. I do not think 
that if it had been any monarch, even 
Caesar, Paul would have felt particu- 
larly abashed in the royal presence. 
But to him it was God, it was Jesus 
Christ, who was leading forth the 
spiritual forces of the universe, and 
was King ; and the heavenly host 
were the aristocrats and nobles. To 
be called into such company touched 
the feeling of humanity in him, as 
well as that of rejoicing pride ; and 
he felt it to be an unspeakable privi- 
lege to be allowed to work with such 
fellow-workmen. 

1295. Conceptions of Christ. — I do 
not suppose there are two persons in 
this congregation who, when they 
think of Jesus, think just alike. If it 
were possible to have spiritual photo- 



28o 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



graphs, as you might imagine projected 
from your thought and feehng about 
Christ, I suppose there would be 
at least three thousand of them here. 
Some of them would be shadowy, 
almost without features ; some would 
be less obscure than others ; some 
would be more stern than others ; 
some would be more glorious than 
others ; some would be more full of 
picturesque imagination than others ; 
and some would be more full of the 
deep experiences of a life much tried 
than others ; they would all have a 
relation to the personal experiences of 
the person whose thought of Christ 
thus projected itself in a visible form. 
1296. Visions of Christ. — I have 
seen a vision of Christ bending over 



me with tenderness, instructing mc in 
heavenly wisdom and radiant knowl- 
edge, and standing as an Advocate of 
the poor and a Defender of the 
wronged ; I have seen a vision of 
Christ clothed with clouds, and I have 
seen those clouds painted with gor- 
geous colors of glory ; I have seen 
ten thousand visions of Christ ; but 
never yet have I seen him. There is, 
however, a day coming when I shall 
see him as he is — not as I have fan- 
cied him to be, not as my heart paints 
him, not as my wants interpret him, 
but as he is. In that illustrious day 
he shall be the chief among ten thou- 
sand and altogether lovely ; forever 
and ever he shall be precious to me, 
my heart's treasure and delight. 



XXIV. THE HOLT SPIRIT 



1297. Need of the Holy Spirit. — 
There is not a daisy that was not or- 
ganized to be a daisy, but I should 
like to see one that did not have the 
sun to help it up from the seed ! there is 
not an aster that was not organized to 
be an aster, but where is there one that 
grew independent of the sun ! What 
the sun is to flowers, that the Holy 
Ghost must be to our hearts, if we 
would be Christians. 

1298. The Holy Spirit and Man. — 
As the sunlight is the father of every 
flower that blossoms — though no 
flower would blossom if it had not 
separate organized existence in the 
plant on which it shines — so " work 
out your own salvation with fear and 
trembling, for it is God that worketh 
in you," describes the working of the 
Divine Spirit in producing right affec- 
tions and good works in man. 

1299. The New Birth. — It is a fa- 
miliar fact, that men, at certain peri- 
ods of their lives, experience changes 
which are like another birth. The 



new life, when the passion, and, still 
more significantly, when the senti- 
ment, of love takes full possession 
of the soul, is familiar. Great men 
date their birth from the hour of 
some great inspiration. Even from 
human sources, from individual men, 
and from society, electric influences 
dart out upon susceptible natures, 
which change their future history. How 
much more powerful should this be if 
there is a Divine Spirit ! If secular 
influence has transforming power, how 
much more divine influence ! 

1300. Human Development. — Man 
is born an unconscious animal ; slowly 
he develops the senses ; he rises to 
social sympathies and to will-power. 
Meantime intellectual and esthetic 
growth accompany the general de- 
velopment. Conscience and spiritual 
susceptibility ripen latest of all. At 
each stage the mind becomes sensitive 
to higher influences and truths, and 
finally it is capable of receiving the 
direct influence of the Divine presence. 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



281 



This is the highest state to which man 
may come upon eaitli. As the touch 
of a musician brings differing sounds 
from the different strings of a harp, so 
the Divine touch, or inbreathing upon 
the soul, brings forth results according 
to each individual nature. 

1 301. A Soul Open to the Light. — 
The sun may shine on a slated roof 
forever, and yet the garret beneath it 
may be dark. So God's Spirit may 
shine forever on your soul, and you 
may not be enlightened. But make 
the roof of glass, and the sun will 
shine through ; and make the way to 
your soul transparent, and the Sun of 
Righteousness will shine in. 

1302. Holy Spirit an Educator. — 
Every man born needs to be born 
again ; and it is a work which is as im- 
possible to men as for a person to 
come suddenly to education, to knowl- 
edge, simply by a volition. No man 
can ever lift himself up so. But it is 
within the power of a man to put him- 
self under instructors and grow up 
into education. And I hold that man 
has not the power to regenerate him- 
self; he is under the stimulating influ- 
ence of the present and immanent 
Spirit of God. 

1303. God's Ways of Influence. — 
A man has been conversant for several 
days with many authors. He has 
read in Burke, he has read in Bacon, 
he has culled much from Leibnitz, and 
others ; and presently there comes to 
him a morning of great inspiration, in 
which he finds his thoughts rising and 
clothing themselves with stores of 
knowledge, and going forth to lay the 
foundations of new arguments and 
statements. It would be impossible 
for him to say of certain thoughts, " I 
got these from the inspiration of 
Burke ; " or, " from the inspiration of 
Bacon ; " or, " from the inspiration of 
Leibnitz." He has received elements 



of inspiration from every one of them, 
but now they are so melted and 
merged that he cannot distinguish 
them from each other ; and the inspi- 
ration which he feels is the result of 
all these elements combined. 

So in the great Divine economy God 
moves upon the mind by the mother, 
by the father, by the schoolmaster, by 
a man's friends, by his enemies, by 
those that he knows and those that he 
does not know, by ten thousand 
agencies, and also by the direct influ- 
ence of the Holy Spirit ; and it is im- 
possible for a man to distinguish be- 
tween the efforts of the Divine mind or 
his own mind and the other instru- 
mentalities which act upon him. 

1304. Working with God. — Philos- 
ophy says, "If it is God that works 
in man, how does man work?" Is 
there no such thing as cooperation ? 
Is there no such thing as inspiration? 
In the midst of battle, men who have 
unflinchingly borne until they are well- 
nigh cut off, are thinking of retreat ; 
and they hear the voice of their cap- 
tain crying out to them, and sending a 
thrill through the air. The result is 
that they nerve themselves up once 
more, and victory comes with this last 
effort. There is success Avhen an- 
other mighty soul is working in them, 
inspiring them to will and to do. 

1305. Divine and Human Co-oper- 
ation. — If I take a plant out of the 
cellar where it has grown etiolated, 
and without chlorophyl, and put it 
where the light of the sun will be 
brought to bear upon it, and where it 
turns green, will you tell me what part 
of the green is plant and what part of 
it is sun? I would say that the sun 
develops this chlorophyl by injecting 
itself, so to speak, into the leaf. The 
command is, "Work out your own 
salvation," " for it is God which work- 
eth in you to will and to do " ; so that 



282 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



tlie Divine influence cooperates with 
human conduct or human thought. 

1306. Divine Inspiration not Crea- 
tion. — The whole history of the Bible 
will show that its great men, preemi- 
nent as being inspired, were acting 
most perfectly in the line of their own 
original endowments when they were 
most inspired. In other words, a man 
is never so much himself as when the 
divine Spirit brings him up to the full- 
ness of all that which he has, but 
which he does not avail himself of. 

Moses was called from birth. In 
other words, he was organized to be 
Moses. And when the Spirit of God 
rested upon him (his wonderful ad- 
ministrative powers covering a breadth 
perhaps never equaled — certainly 
never surpassed), it was the Divine 
Spirit simply acting upon an organiza- 
tion already precast for that work. 
Massive-browed was he. Large uni- 
versally was he. The comprehensive- 
ness, the foresight, the complexity and 
wisdom of his mind, the whole knowl- 
edge of life, of society, and of men, 
manifested by the great lawgiver of 
the desert — these were developed by 
the Spirit of God in him ; they were 
not created by inspiration without any 
regard to his organization. 

1307. Original Christianity. — Chris- 
tianity itself was not a system of 
truths, nor the result of a system of 
truths, but a name for living forces. 
It was a new dispensation of power, an 
efflux of the Divine Spirit, developing 
tlie latent spiritual forces in man. It 
was the kingdom of God among men. 
It was like the diffusion of a new and 
more fervid climate over a whole 
continent. A development and per- 
fection would follow, never before 
known, and impossible to a lower 
temperature. 

1308. What is Christianity? — It is 
not my arm, or my foot, or my head, 



or my blood, or all of them together, 
that make me a man ; it is something 
which is using all these things, and 
which we call the vital principle. All 
these other things together, without 
this vital force, amount to nothing. It 
is precisely in analogy with this that 
Christianity is to the nature of man a 
divine force, spiritualizing him. 

What, then, is a Christian life? It 
is the life of the human soul, derived 
not alone from natural laws, not alone 
from the incitements of society, pro- 
cured not by human causes, but dis- 
tinctively and peculiarly a life derived 
from God. It results from the union 
of our mind with the Divine mind ; it 
is the indwelling of the Divine influence 
in the human soul in such a way that 
man has an incitement and an inspira- 
tion higher than any that can come from 
native and material causes. You may 
call this supernatural ; I do not think 
it is supernatural. The action of the 
Divine mind upon the human mind is 
as much in the course of nature as the 
construction of the human soul itself. 

1309. Man's Spirit Needs God's 
Spirit. — There is no man who has, 
under any culture, been brought up 
so far but that he needs the outpour- 
ing of the Divine soul on his soul, to 
enable him to bring forth the blossom 
or the fruit of righteousness in the 
realm of the spirit. . . . For the 
archer almost to hit is not to hit at all ; 
and good as a man may be, high as 
he may have risen in the transition 
from the carnal man towards the spir- 
itual man, after all, no man has really 
made that transition until he has felt 
the inspiration, the impulse of the 
spirit and soul of God himself. 

1 3 10. Condemnation and Hope Rec- 
onciled.- — Ordinarily men are as pen- 
dulums between the seventh and the 
eighth of Romans, taking in con- 
demnation upon one side, and hope 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



283 



on the other ; and so they oscillate, 
vibrating between hope and fear. 
But there is a reconcihation. It is a 
reconciUation, however, that cannot 
take place except in a soul that is in 
the possession of Christ, and subject 
to the blessed rule of love. In that 
soul there is perfect reconciliation, so 
that you may feel every day, " I come 
short ; I am a sinner, and yet I am 
reconciled ; I rebel, yet I love ; I dis- 
obey, yet I long to obey ; I am sorry, 
yet I am comforted ; I am my own, 
yet I am more His." The most op- 
posite experiences take place, and are 
perfectly reconciled by the transform- 
ing influence of that love which is 
shed abroad in the soul by the power 
of the Holy Ghost. 

131 1. Divine Influence on Human 
Soul. — How shall I know whether 
these motives are of my own self, or 
whether they are the concurrent stim- 
ulating influences of the Divine mind? 
You cannot tell. It was not meant 
nor is it necessary that you should. 

When a steamship is making her 
course across the Atlantic, and her 
own engine is propelling the hull, and 
the wind is fair, and the captain has 
raised all the sails, suppose the hull 
should say : " Engineer, can you tell 
me how much of my motion I am to 
attribute to the engine, and how much 
belongs to the sails ? He would re- 
ply, "They are both working to- 
gether, and you cannot separate the 
one from the other." 

" But," it is said, " is not this taking 
from the glory of God ? " If you will 
show me that he thinks so, I will 
admit it. But if this be fact, then it 
is the method that God has chosen ; 
and that which he has chosen is doubt- 
less that which is the most glorious to 
himself. This attempting to be more 
jealous about God's glory than he is 
himself, is a piece of supreme imperti- 



nence, of spiritual self-conceit ; or else 
it is logic run mad ! 

1312. Religious Helpfulness of Sci- 
ence. — I look with favor upon the fact 
that in the external world science is 
preparing new materials and new in- 
strumentalities, and that it is working 
so nearly in harmony with the Church 
of Christ. But, after all, it is my con- 
viction that there are no results flow- 
ing from the lower natural causes that 
may or can supersede the fashioning 
effect and the divine influence of the 
Spirit of God. They will work to- 
gether with God, As science teaches 
the husbandman to work in better co- 
operation with natural laws, so we are 
taught to work seeking a better un- 
derstanding of the human soul ; but 
there never will be such skill in mas- 
terly manipulation, that the soul will 
not need the vitalizing influence of the 
Holy Spirit. 

1 31 3. Divine Power through Hu- 
man Mediums. — What is it in Mr. 
Moody and Mr. Sankey that renders 
them so wonderfully successful in 
their Evangelist work ? You might 
just as well look at a pane of plate 
glass in a window and wonder what 
there is in it that makes the landscape 
so beautiful outside of it. It is through 
them that the work goes on. The 
power lies outside and above. 

1 3 14. God Working Through Men. 
— You know how feeble a thing a root 
is. If you examine a root, you find 
it soft as dough in a kneading-trough. 
And yet, look along the pavement, and 
see how that root, quietly growing, 
lifts the hugest slab. All the engines 
on earth, put together, could not do 
as much work as one ten-acre meadow 
of grass, growing without noise and 
without clatter. How mighty are the 
invisible forces of nature ! 

Now, it was the interior feeling of 
souls that were roused to a consider- 



284 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



ation of the infinite ; it was the tran- 
scendent experiences and impulses of 
a few men, poor, obscure, and de- 
spised, that were mightier than 
thrones, or laws, or customs. These 
few men, inspired by the Holy Ghost, 
threw down the mightiest temples and 
upturned what ages had built, though 
the learning of the world and the 
politics of the world and the customs 
of the world were against them, and 
the passions of the world, like an im- 
mense Gulf-stream, swept in upon 
them. The Spirit of the eternal God 
in the human soul was mightier than 
all these things. And as it was then, 
so it has been again and again. 

This is the reason Christianity does 
not die out, though every hundred 
years it seems about to be extinguished 
by advancing philosophy. 

13 15. Light to be Received. — But 
you will ask me, " Is not God's Spirit 
special? Is it universal?" God's 
Spirit IS universal. It becomes spe- 
cial when your volition accepts and 
takes it. God's Spirit follows the law 
of God's sun. The whole heaven is 
full of light. And yet, if you go into 
your house, and shut the door, there 
is no sun to you. If you leave your 
dwelling, or cave, and go out into the 
sunlight, it is all yours, and it becomes 
personal to you and your wants. And 
as it is with the natural sun, so it is 
with the Sun of Righteousness. 

1316. God Working in Us. — Sun- 
light is universal ; it shines every- 
where ; but when you bring it to bear 
upon your plants in green-houses you 
specialize it. The Black Hamburg 
grape you cannot raise out of doors 
although there is sunlight there. You 
build glass houses ; you so arrange 
them that the sun's rays fall upon the 
vines ; you secure the conditions re- 
quired for their growth ; and the con- 
sequence is that you have fruit. There 



are certain latitudes in which given 
results cannot be obtained by sun- 
liglit without specializing it. The Di- 
vine influence is diffused upon the 
good and the bad alike, just as the 
sunlight is ; but when men understand 
it, and accept it by the force of their 
own will, thus putting themselves in 
the line of God's nature, it becomes 
special to them, and works out in 
them both to will and to do of God's 
good pleasure. 

13 1 7. Divine Spirit in Every Soul. 
— There is the balm of the summer 
day, but that balm is not what you 
alone recognize. It comforts a mil- 
lion roots in the lawn before your 
house. The summer is not merely 
the warm air which you are cognizant 
of. The cricket knows it. The grass- 
hopper knows it. The moss knows 
it. The very stones, that grow warm 
and stimulate the moss which covers 
them, know it. Ten thousand little 
delicate insects know it. All blossoms 
know it. The leaves know it. The 
fruits know it. The summer is work- 
ing silently but universally. It fills 
everything with its own qualities. 

And so, not only must my God be 
the Lord of heaven and the Governor 
of the earth at large, but his personal 
relations to me must be such that he 
shall be in nie all the time, and must 
be working within me. 

1318. Man Responsible. — I should 
as soon attempt to raise flowers if 
there were no atmosphere, or produce 
fruits if there were neither light nor 
heat, as to regenerate men if I did not 
believe there was a Holy Ghost. 

Nevertheless, this Divine influence 
is not irresistible in such a sense as to 
relieve men from responsibility. God 
wakes up the soul, and then says to 
it, " Work out your own salvation 
with fear and trembling ; for it is God 
that worketh in you." The inspira- 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



285 



tion of the Divine mind gives us pos- 
session of our own faculties, and we 
are to labor with them, applying the 
proper causes for the attainment of 
given results, as much in religious as 
in secular things. 

1 31 9. Utilizing the Divine Spirit. — 
Man is acted upon by the Divine 
Spirit at all times ; but he may pre- 
pare himself so that he shall be acted 
upon the most favorably. There 
would be summer if there were not a 
farmer ; but the farmer knows how to 
make summer work to advantage for 
him, as otherwise it would not have 
done. There would be flowers if 
there were no florists ; but the florist 
knows how to make the sun bring 
forth exquisite color and forms, as it 
never would have done if it had not 
been for his preparation. 

1320. Ripening Power of Divine In- 
fluence. — Bring me an apple, and let 
me taste it ; if it is hard and acid, I 
say, "It was a rainy summer where 
that grew, and it did not have much 
sun." Bring me another apple, and 
if it is mellow and full of sugar and 
aroma, I say, "Ah! that sugar and 
that aroma never came out of the 
ground : they must have come from 
where there were light and heat." 
And I can judge of the influences un- 
der which nations have been unfolded 
by the nature of the fruit which they 
produce. Show me a nation that is 
developing coarse animalism, and I 
will show you a nation that has not 
been true to that Light which cometh 
into the world to light every man, 
which shines into the darkness, and 
which the darkness comprehends not. 
On the other hand, show me an indi- 
vidual, a family, a community or a 
nation, that yields the products of a 
higher moral nature, and I will pro- 
nounce that higher moral nature to be 
the result of Divine inspiration. 



1321. Fruits of the Spirit. — We are 
not to suppose, because a peach is so 
luscious and beautiful, that it is the 
child of the sun any more than a par- 
tridge berry. The humblest little 
berry that grows on the ground is the 
child of the sun. It is nourished and 
made what it is by the sun. All the 
way up from moss to the cedar of 
Lebanon, everything that grows is, in 
its place, the child of the sun. Now, 
all right experiences, from the lowest 
to the very highest, are fruits of the 
Spirit in men. They differ in different 
individuals ; but they are possible to 
all in different degrees, according to 
their natural endowments, and their 
education and endeavor. 

1322. Truth Immortal. — As there 
cannot be anything lost chemically, as 
there can only be change from one 
form into another, so I apprehend that 
there has been nothing of truth lost. 
There have been enormous changes in 
systems of theology, but they have 
been changes from one form to an- 
other. I believe that nothing which was 
true, and carried benefit in it, has 
been lost. There is no evidence what- 
ever that the world has lost out a 
physical truth, a social truth, a civic 
truth, an economical truth, a moral 
truth, or a spiritual truth. There is no 
evidence that any truth has ever re- 
turned void. In so far as truths have 
been developed they have mingled 
themselves with the life of the world, 
and they are going on to this day still 
beating in the veins of men, still man- 
aging human affairs, still reporting 
themselves the servants of God, and 
still accomplishing the errands on 
which he sent them.' 

1323. Spiritual Guidance. — I re- 
member very well when I first opened 

> " No whisper of the Holy Ghost 
The careless world hath ever lost." 
. — Emerson, 



286 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



my algebra. Of all minds set to solve 
an algebraic problem, I think mine 
was the least adapted to it ; and if I 
had been left to myself I never should 
have got beyond the very simplest 
equations. I should never have got 
so far. Fortunately, however, I had 
a school-teacher who would take no 
refusal, and who put the pressure upon 
me and said, " The lesson that I pre- 
scribe you must learn. I will accept 
no excuse. I do not care whether 
anybody helps you or not ; I don't 
care how you get through ; but I am 
determined that this shall be learned 
by you." There was a strife of 
several days in which, fortunately, he 
was victorious. The pressure and the 
influence continued till I gained one 
or two victories ; then the pride of suc- 
cess in intellectual conflict was born 
in me ; and for the first time I felt an 
inherent power to undertake to do 
difficult things by my understajiding, 
by my courage and by my continuity. 
So a miracle was wrought, and I be- 
came an algebraist. To myself it was 
a thing out of the question ; but it was 
possible under the guiding pressure of 
a skillful, energetic and coercive 
teacher. The life of the spirit is 
harder than algebra ; men need skill- 
ful guidance in it. 

1324. Privilege of Taking Divine 
Guidance. — If the shipmaster chooses 
to bring in his ship, and can do it, 
without a pilot, who cares ? If, seeing 
the lights that are kindled along the 
coast, he says, " I do not need those 
lights ; I can bring my ship in without 
them," is there any fine for his not 
looking at the lights ? But if the night 
is dark ; if the landmarks are all 
rubbed out ; if he is going on to the 
coast, and he feels, " I would to God 
that I knew where I was ! " and if, as 
he speaks, there opens up the light, so 
that he says, " Thank God ! I knovi* 



that light ; now I know where I am " ; 
and he brings his ship safely in, has 
he not reason to thank God for the 
lighthouse ? 

The truths of God's Spirit are lit up 
along the way of human life, not be- 
cause there is any duty of directing 
your course by them, but because 
tliere is infinitely more — because you 
need just such stimulation, just such 
guidance, and God gives it to you. 

1325. Earthly and Heavenly Power. 
— Let all the scientists in the world go 
down to the seacoast and say, " We 
will draw the tide up," and there is no 
pneumatic force, there is no force of 
hydrostatics that can raise the tide one 
inch ; but when the moon moves in its 
course far up in the heavens, and ex- 
erts its power upon the seas, they 
yield to its attraction. And when you 
go forth with great alacrity, to bring 
to bear upon the race of mankind all 
the forces which belong to this world, 
you cannot start it ; but let loose upon 
it the attraction of the knowledge of 
God in Christ Jesus and the tides 
begin to move irresistibly ; and that 
which no human power could do, no 
human power can resist. 

1326. Spiritual Death. — A man is 
taken out of the water into which he 
has fallen. It is feared that he is past 
recovery. He is brought in. He no 
longer hears, nor speaks, nor sees, 
nor breathes, nor moves, nor shows 
any evidence of feeling. And you say, 
" He is dead." Why is he said to be 
dead ? Because he lacks sensibility. 

Now, take a man that is spiritually 
dead. Pinch his conscience ; he does 
not start. Bring before him the law, 
and let it thunder in his ears ; it makes 
no impression upon him. Pierce him 
with the sword of the Spirit ; he does 
not feel it ; he is not susceptible to 
fear ; he has no moral sensibility. 
And you say that that man is spirit- 



THE HOLY SPIRIT 



287 



ually dead because he is not alive to 
Divine influences. 

1327. Unforeseen Effects. — Who 
can imagine a greater difference than 
exists between the raindrop when it 
falls and the raindrop when it re- 
appears speedily in vegetable growths 
— in the grass, the flower, the stalwart 
tree? It comes from the cloud, and 
rests upon the earth ; but quickly it is 
caught up, and set to work in the strange 
enginery of nature. It finds its way 
into life, and in that life it makes 
acquaintance, through the leaves, with 
the sun. It fell rain ; it comes forth a 
leaf. It fell a liquid, transparent 
drop ; it rises in varied forms of beauty 
and use. You cannot tell by the way 
a cause strikes the earth — whether 
material or spiritual — what is the form 
of the effect it shall produce when it 
enters the laboratory where God is the 
chemist and the worker. 

1328. Heavenly Guidance. — When 
some poor Southern refugee, seeking 
the Union lines in the mountains, 
sought some guide ; when the way 
was dark and unknown, and he was 
all frost-bitten, hungry, half naked, 
and discouraged, fearing to trust any 
light or fire lest it be the enemy's, and 
at last the clouds parted, and the 
north star shone — that one single 
point of guidance of the frigid sky — 
cold and distant, and, to every other 
eye almost than his, cheerless, how it 
filled his soul with gladness and joy ! 
How it lifted him up above present 
trials, and brought him safely through, 
guiding him ! And so a light, far 
away in heaven, is better than all the 
torches and gas lights that we can 
light here upon earth. 

1329. Attraction. — As in the royalty 
of spring the sun stands in the lieaven, 
and draws up on every side the vapors 
from the sea, or river, or meadow, 



and then in the glory of the heaven 
transfigures them all, so the Sun of 
Righteousness in your soul is drawing 
up the filmy, fleecy clouds of ex- 
pectation and hope. Your very yearn- 
ings and unsatisfied longings are point- 
ing one way, and saying, " Beyond, 
beyond; your life is there." 

1330. "In Him We Live." — In a 
few months we shall renew the scenes 
of spring ; and what will be the 
phenomena of that spring ? Shall we 
hear the underground thunder of all 
the roots trooping to break out ? 
Will subterranean waters flood the 
orchards and forests and fields to 
wake up the trees ? The voice that 
shall give resurrection to all nature in 
the coming spring is not that. The 
sun lingers a little longer, and silently, 
on the fields ; the air grows a little 
warmer ; day unto day uttereth 
speech, and night unto night showeth 
knowledge of the Divine power ; the 
heavens grow moist ; and out of the 
bosom of the invisible spring, not de- 
scending, but ascending from the 
earth, come the root, the bud and the 
blossom ; and when the orchards are 
purple, when the autumn baskets are 
filled with glorious fruit, and when 
the harvests wave in the fields, stand 
and see that these things have not 
sprung from matter to matter. It is 
the invisible kingdom above that has 
created them. They are children of 
the sun, of the winds and of the air. 

Out of the great invisible atmosphere 
of the spirit God is moving human 
hearts in a like way ; and though 
they come up as corn from the soil, 
though the trees clap their hands as 
upon the mountain side, though all 
things seem to be of the earth, earthy, 
it is this Divine atmosphere, after all, 
that creates them ; and they all ap- 
pear on earth as heavenly work. 



288 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



XXF. CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 



1331. No Conscience. — A man who 
has no conscience is hke a man with- 
out a dog. The door is open to every 
prowler by day and by night. 

1332. Wrong Use of Conscience. — 
Many men carry their conscience like 
a drawn sword, cutting this way and 
that, in the world, but sheathe it, and 
keep it very soft and quiet, when it is 
turned within, thinking that a sword 
should not cut its own scabbard. 

1333- A Sensitive Conscience. — 
Why was it that when Rossini, or 
Beethoven, in his earlier and better 
days, pressed down a consecutive 
row of keys he felt a shock ? Was it 
because the grammar of music had 
been violated ? No ; discord with the 
fundamental nature of his musical 
faculties — that was the reason. He 
could not bear a discord ; and no 
matter if all the grammar in the world 
had said it was right he would have 
said, by the force of his own organiza- 
tion, " It is wrong, it is hateful." 
And there ought to be in every manly 
soul such a sense of fitness in justice 
and in equity, as between man and 
man, that honesty should in itself be 
beautiful and necessary to him. 

1334. The Unloving Conscience. — 
There is no tyranny more intolerable 
than a conscience unrestrained by 
love. Like an ill-loaded gun, it re- 
coils at the breech and kills at the 
muzzle. A conscience unsubdued by 
love torments the owner, and bruises 
those upon whom he lets it loose. 

i335> Conscience Works Evil and 
Good. — There is not a single feeling 
of the mind that does not put on the 
mask of conscience to do its own 
work — and the dirtiest work as much 
as the purest. When a man says, " I 
have looked at this matter, and I have 
come to this conclusion," he is a 



pope, infallible — that is, he acts as 
though he felt like one — and the more 
obstinate he is, the more he will tell 
us that he acts on principle. Some- 
times it may be on principle that he 
acts ; but oftener it is not. 

1336. Humor the Friend of Con- 
science. — I have noticed in great as- 
semblies that when men get by the 
ears, and their combative feelings 
have arisen, and they are ready for a 
fierce conflict, one good stroke of 
humor puts it all back, and the men 
smile, and look at each other with 
friendly eyes. I tell you, humor is 
the friend of conscience ; and any 
man whose conscience does not Hke 
humor I suspect keeps worse com- 
pany than that — the company of com- 
bativeness and destructiveness. 

1337- The Microscopic Conscience. 
— There is a conscience that concerns 
itself principally about minute things, 
none for broad, large views, has no 
momentum in it, no trusting of itself, 
without which a man is but a poor 
creature — invertebrate. I hold that it 
is with human conduct as it is with 
the ship, when once the motion is im- 
pelled the momentum is of vast im- 
portance. And in society a man that 
is all the time stopping to see whether 
he is doing right or not, and analyz- 
ing his thoughts and his motives and 
his feelings without any knowledge of 
how to analyze, is like a man who is so 
anxious that he stops his watch every 
few minutes, to see if it is going. 

1338. The Department Conscience. 
— There is what may be called a de- 
partment conscience. Thus, a man 
is serving a church, and the church 
itself is operose and multitudinous, 
and filled up with a great many things, 
and the man has a very active con- 
science in everything that belongs to 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 289 



church life ; but he has very httle 
conscience for family life — does not 
hesitate at all to make people 
wretched all round about him. He 
has a conscience for the cathedral, 
but none for the house. A great 
many men have a conscience for 
Sunday, but none for Monday. 

1339. Spontaneity in Conscience. — 
We may be in long perplexity as to 
what is right and what is wrong, what 
is duty and what is to be avoided ; but 
men should be so trained that the mo- 
ment they know what is right they 
instantly — not by reasoning with them- 
selves, not by persuasion, but by 
automatic necessity — should go for the 
right ; and with equal promptness, al- 
most before they think of it them- 
selves, should go against the wrong. 
We learn it with our feet, for if a man 
be walking the street and the ground 
be hummocky, and here and there in- 
terspersed with puddles, he never 
stops to think of the difference be- 
tween liquid mud and solid earth, or 
anything of the kind, but his feet pick 
out the right way all the time. And 
in the great sphere of life, where the 
paths are so muddy, and there is so 
much to be avoided as well as sought 
out, the training that we require is one 
that leads a man to defer instantly to 
his sense of rectitude, and to measure- 
ment by what he knows to be right, 
and just, and true, and proper. 

1340. How Conscience Acts. — Con- 
science acts within the mind accord- 
ing to the law of companionship. 
If a man's conscience works with fear 
he becomes superstitious ; if it works 
with hope he shoots in the other direc- 
tion continuously : and it is to the last 
degree of importance that men should 
know what the conscience is about in- 
side of them. Conscience has often 
been a gladiator and a murderer, not 
because it was bad, but because it 



was bad in combination with the 
animal passions and faculties. Were 
there ever more conscientious men 
than those who burned men, broke 
them on the wheel ; that everywhere 
turned this world through the profes- 
sion of religion into an aceldama ? 
Conscience ! they had conscience 
enough, but it was a perverted con- 
science working with bad inspirations. 

1341. Conscience: Sundays, and 
Week-Days. — On Sunday, if you could 
look into a man's soul, when he has 
had a good night's rest ; when the 
world has had its hands off from him 
some hours, and he has begun to be 
at equipoise and equihbrium ; when 
he has been to church, where the 
organ has swung around its wings, 
and blown, as it were, the dust of the 
world from the air ; when by singing, 
and preaching he has been brought to 
a higher state of feeling — then, if you 
could look into his soul, you would 
see conscience, hope, faith, love, sit- 
ting in the judges' chairs ; and down 
in the culprit's box below would be 
hatred, anger, avarice, the various 
appetites. Oh, how a man's soul 
talks to his passions on Sunday ! 

Monday and Tuesday let us go into 
that man's court again. Where are 
those celestial judges ? Who are in 
the chairs now ? The appetites, avar- 
ice, anger, hatred, are there. All 
those surly and ill-visaged passions 
are in the judges' bench. And what 
stands before them ? A poor trem- 
bling conscience is standing down in 
the culprit's box, and being tried. 
What for? Why, in the business af- 
fairs of Monday or Tuesday there 
came from conscience this plea : that 
a man ought to stand to his principles, 
and do right ; and instantly these 
lower passions rose up, and said, "A 
pretty kind of casuistry that is which 
holds that a man should sacrifice his 



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interests for the salcc of his principles ! 
J5usiness is business ; fact is fact ; Ufe 
is life ; money is money." The higher 
feelings were put down by the lower. 

1342. Reason and Conscience. — The 
reason stands related to all sentiments 
— to conscience and the rest — as the 
keys on the key-board do to the pipes 
in an organ. All the pipes have tlie 
potentiality of certain sounds, differ- 
ing one from another ; but they do not 
sound themselves. They never open 
their throat to speak until the keys are 
pressed. We open them with our 
hands. The whole issuing range of 
harmony from the instrument is de- 
termined at the key-board. 

So reason is the key-board of the 
mind ; and when it pronounces any 
course of conduct, or any action, to 
be right, the conscience approves it — 
that is, it gives forth the sentiment of 
pleasure to itself; and when the rea- 
son condemns any course of conduct 
or action, then the conscience gives 
back the sentiment of pain. 

1343. The Habit of Duty. — Some- 
where in Central or Western New 
York, there are four or five artificial 
lakes. The engineers of the Erie 
Canal meant to obtain the water that 
would be required, from small streams; 
but it was found that in the drought of 
summers those streams ran so low as 
to render the supply insufficient. The 
result was, that back in the country 
where there were superior facilities for 
collecting large quantities of water, 
these artificial lakes were created, 
which serve as reservoirs for feeding 
the canal from the time when the 
dry season commences until the fall 
rains come on. 

Now, you must have a reservoir to 
supply what you lack when the small 
streams of impulse fail ; and that must 
be conscience. It must be a sense of 
duty. It must be habit. 



1344. Other Men's Consciences. — 
A good driver drives with his eye on 
every other driver in the street. It is 
not enough for me to drive my own 
horse, and take care of my own 
wagon. I must look out for other 
people's horses and wagons as well. 
I must keep in view the position of all 
the vehicles in the street, and act ac- 
cordingly. Unless I do these things I 
am not a good driver. And a man in 
carrying his own conscience must con- 
sider the consciences of others. In 
following the dictates of his own con- 
science he must do no violence to the 
consciences of other people. 

1345- Conscience, the Guide. — A 
man may cut away every mast on his 
ship, and yet pursue his voyage. A 
man may have everything on deck 
carried overboard, and yet make some 
headway. A man in the middle of 
the ocean can afford to lose everything 
else better than he can afford to lose 
the compass in the binnacle. When 
that is gone he has nothing to steer 
by. And that conscience which God 
has given you is your compass and 
guide. You can afford to lose genius, 
and taste, and reason, and judgment, 
better than that. Keep that as the 
apple of your eye. Keep it clear, and 
strong, and discerning. Be in love 
with your conscience ; and let your 
conscience be in love with God. 

1346. — Sins under Conscience.- — Of 
all noble forces an educated, intelli- 
gent and modest conscience is the 
best. But what a weak and ridiculous 
thing conscience is made to be in life ! 
It is the liveried servant of the soul, 
and runs on all errands ; a lackey, 
running for every master. It is the 
diplomatical liar of the soul ; it is the 
hard advocate, serving in turn every 
evil impulse. Pride sends conscience 
out in its service. Vanity fees it. Anger 
rides it. Even cruelty makes it hold 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 291 



the knife and slay the victim. It is 
conscience that makes men suspicious. 
It is conscience that makes men fear- 
ful of trusting others, that refuses rec- 
onciliations, that dresses obstinacy in 
the colors of duty. Conscience lends 
its name and its clothes to every pas- 
sion in turn, to masquerade withal. 
Poor fool, it serves all sides of evil, 
and knows it not. It is every man's 
mule, and every man rides it. It 
carries men to every evil errand. 
" For conscience' sake " they quarrel, 
slander, and revenge themselves, they 
are obstinate, obdurate and uncharit- 
able. Conscience issues signed blank 
checks to every angry passion, and 
leaves each one to fill them up ac- 
cording to his own pleasure. 

1347. A Conscience for Others. — I 
have heard of women joining the 
church, who, having a conscience that 
would not let them wear flowers and 
feathers in their cap, would give them 
to their younger sister ! If a man is 
going to abandon wickedness because 
it is too wicked for him, shall he sell 
out his stock-in-trade to another man, 
as if it were not wicked for him 
also ? 

1348. Sullying of Conscience. — It is 
not necessary to break a mirror to 
pieces in order to make it worthless. 
Let one go behind it with a pencil, or 
with a needle of the finest point, and, 
with delicate touch, make the smallest 
line through the silver coating of the 
back ; the next day let him make an- 
other line at right angles to that ; and 
the third day let him make still an- 
other line parallel to the first one ; and 
the next day let him make another 
line parallel to the second, and so con- 
tinue to do day by day, and one year 
shall not have passed away before 
that mirror will be so scratched that it 
will be good for nothing. It is not 
necessary to deal it a hard blow to de- 



stroy its power ; these dehcate touches 
will do it, little by little. 

It is not necessary to be a murderer 
or a burglar in order to destroy the 
moral sense ; but ah ! these million 
little infelicities, as they are called, 
these scratchings and raspings, take 
the silver off from the back of the 
conscience — take the brightness and 
clearness out of the moral sense. 

1349. Dimming of Conscience. — It 
is recorded of a hghthouse erected on 
a tropical shore that it was like to have 
failed for the most unlooked-for 
reason. When first kindled, the bril- 
Hant light drew about it such clouds 
of insects which populate the evening 
and night of equatorial lands that they 
covered and fairly darkened the glass. 
There was a noble light that shone out 
into the darkness and vanquished 
night, that all the winds could not dis- 
turb, nor all the clouds and storms 
hide ; but the soft wings and gauzy 
bodies of myriads of insects, each one 
of which was insignificant, efi"ectually 
veiled the light, and came near de- 
feating the proposed gift to mariners. 
And so it is in respect to the con- 
science. There may be a power in it 
to resist great assault, to overcome 
strong temptations, and to avoid fear- 
ful dangers, but there may be a mil- 
lion little venomous insect habits, un- 
important in themselves individually, 
but fearful in their results collectively. 

1350. Temptation's Power. — It is in 
our own bosom that the power of 
temptation is found. Temptation is 
but a spark. If a spark fall upon ice, 
if it fall upon snow, if it fall upon 
water, what is the harm? But if it 
fall upon powder — the powder is yours, 
the spark only is the devil's ! 

1351. Mysterious Powers of Evil. — 
When, on a summer day, there is the 
shadow of a hawk sailing far up over 
my barnyard, Mr. Fowl gives the 



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signal of warning. The very sluulovv 
is seen ; and the chickens run, and the 
whole brood hide themselves. But 
the hawk that sails over us casts no 
shadow. Mysterious powers of dark- 
ness hover about here and there and 
no man can define them, or tell their 
mission ; and the only thing one can 
do is to be always ready to meet and 
resist them. " Put on the whole 
armor of God, that ye may be able to 
withstand the wiles (the onsets) of the 
Devil." 

1352. Tempter and Tempted. — The 
power of temptation depends upon two 
elements ; first, the power of present- 
ing inducement or motive on the part 
of the tempter ; and, secondly and 
mainly, the strength in the victim of 
the passion to which this motive is pre- 
sented. No one could tempt to pride 
a man that had not already a powerful 
tendency to pride. The chord must 
be there before the hand of the harper 
can bring out the tone. 

1353' Temptation Suggestive, not 
Compulsory. — Temptation holds a 
parallel and analogic course with in- 
spiration. It is simply a stimulus, 
coming from wherever it may. applied 
to a faculty, or to classes of faculties, 
in the human mind — faculties of which 
men have, or should have, mtghthdive, 
full control. If any evil is wrought 
out through you, you work it out 
wholly and absolutely. As in inspir- 
ation, no virtue is wrought out by the 
Divine mind, and then deposited in the 
human soul ; no conception is pictor- 
ially drawn, and then slid into the 
knowledge-chamber of the human 
mind already formed. The Divine in- 
fluence simply vivifies and impels the 
natural organism, by which God gov- 
erns, and on which government stands. 
And so precisely is it with the opposite. 
Malign influence is simply suggestive, 
stimulative. It merely impels. And 



if, being impelled, men do evil, as 
when, being impelled, they do right, 
the right or the wrong is their own act, 
for which they are responsible. 

1354. Steadiness Under Tempta- 
tion. — If one looks out upon New 
York harbor, after an eastern storm, 
he will see it covered with craft, that 
brood upon its surface in flocks like 
wild fowl ; nor can the eye, at a dis- 
tance, tell why they hold their places, 
swinging but a little way with the 
changing tide, facing the wind obsti- 
nately and refusing to be blown away. 
Every one is rooted by its anchor. 

If men are found in life much 
tempted and yet firm in principle, there 
is an anchor somewhere. It may be 
a sweetheart, or a sister, or a mother, 
a wife, a father, or an old stanch 
teacher. Men anchor each other. 

1355- The Danger-Line in Morals. 
— It is never safe for a man to run so 
near the line of right and wrong that 
if he should lose a wheel he would go 
over. You should keep so far from 
the precipice that if your wagon breaks 
down there is room enough. 

1356. Peril in Temptation, — No 
man knows, if he is once in the swirl 
of the mighty maelstrom of tempta- 
tion, when his oar will break, or when 
his arm will give out and he will be 
swept down into the engulfing ocean. 
Therefore steer clear. Go not into 
those dangers. 

1357. Nature's Retribution. — Every 
man has nestling in him, somewhere, 
that which will by and by arrest him 
for every evil thing that he does. 
You may do wrong against the civil 
law, and not be caught ; you may do 
wrong against your neighbor, and not 
be caught ; but every man that does 
any wrong against himself carries a 
detective in his own soul ; and, first 
or last, that wrong will avenge itself 
on him. 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 293 



1358. Power of the Passions. — Who 
is he that has not passions ? They 
are the overmastering part in many 
natures. They swell, as the tides 
swell. They burn as the fires burn. 
They sweep as storms and winds 
sweep. And no man can perform his 
duty to himself — certainly not to his 
God — who does not understand that 
the battle of the passions is one which 
must be watched. 

1359. Insidious Sins. — Men do well 
to watch and fight against obvious and 
sounding sins. They are numerous. 
They exist on every hand. They are 
dangerous. They are armed and are 
desperate. They swarm the ways of 
life. Not one vice, not one crime, not 
one temptation, not one sin of which 
the Word of God warns us, is to be 
lightly esteemed. They are to be 
watched, and in armor, too ; we are 
to be proof against them. 

But these are not our only dangers. 
Tens of thousands of men perish, not 
by the lion-like stroke of temptation, 
but by the insidious bite of the hidden 
serpent ; not with roar and strength, 
but with subtle poison. More men 
are moth-eaten than lion-eaten in this 
life ; and it behooves us in time to 
give heed to these dangers of invisible 
and insidious little enemies. 

1360. Dangers of Unseen Indul- 
gence. — Mines and tunnels are a part 
of the methods of military proceed- 
ings. Underground, unheard and un- 
suspected, the engineer pushes his 
way ; and at last he plants the ma- 
terial of destruction right under the 
fort : and then the sudden explosion 
comes, with confusion, followed by a 
rush, and, haply, by the victory of the 
attacking party. And often and often 
men go through courses of their career 
in this world, immoderately indulging 
in right things, or falling into indul- 
gence in wrong things, little by little, 



moving cautiously, and, as they sup- 
pose, safely, and are at last, in a day 
when they look not for it, overtaken 
by the consequences of their indul- 
gence and excesses. We are under- 
mined, we are broken down, we are 
taken captive, unawares, by evils 
which result from errors and trans- 
gressions on our part. 

1 36 1. To Guard Against Passions. 
— Passions are snares ; and the way 
to extract a man's self from snares, is 
not to be caught in them. Passions 
are lions in ambush ; and the way to 
deliver one's self from the lions is to 
take another path, and go where they 
are not. Passions are tigers that lurk 
at the corners and in the dark recesses 
of the way. Take another path. That 
will take you out of the tiger's reach. 
Passions are dangerous, like pitfalls, 
like precipices. Don't go near them. 

1362. When to Watch. — Men must 
set their watch at the time when the 
enemy is accustomed to come. In- 
dians usually make their attack at 
three or four o'clock in the morning, 
when men sleep soundest ; and that is 
the time to watch against Indians. 
There is no use of doing it at ten 
o'clock in the morning. They do not 
come then. If it be when you are 
sick that you are most subject to 
malign passions, then that is the time 
when you must set your watch. Or, 
if it be when you are well that the 
tide of blood swells too feverishly in 
you, then that is the time when you 
must set your watch. If at one time 
of the day more than another, experi- 
ence has shown that you are liable to 
be tempted, then in that part of the 
day you must be on your guard. 

1363. Danger in Dalliance. — There 
are a great many persons young in 
conscience, inexperienced, and to a 
certain extent innocent, who permit 
themselves to do what the riper ex- 



294 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



pci icncc even of bad men would never 
permit them to do. Tliere is siicli a 
tiling as dallyiiii!^ witii temptation. 
Many a maiden will insensibly, and 
step by step, allow herself to be led to 
tilings that, if not wrong, are yet so 
near to it that they lie in its very twi- 
light ; and she is all the time excusing 
to herself such permissions and such 
dalliance, and saying, " I do not in- 
tend to do wrong. I shall in due time 
recover myself." 

1364. When to Escape from Evil. — 
When the tide is out, it is charming to 
walk about on the sand. But when 
tlie tide conies in there is danger, un- 
less one is on the alert. For it comes 
steahng in almost imperceptibly, and 
often shuts off the promontories long 
before it runs up into the bay. And 
if a man is amusing himself there with 
no heed and no outlook, the insidious 
tide, which comes in sweet as the 
blossoming of a flower, but with all 
the power of the ocean behind it, will 
overtake him. If he does not flee be- 
fore the promontories are shut off, he 
will never flee. It is now ornever! 

If there are any here in whom the 
tide of appetite, or the tide of passion, 
or the tide of infatuation for gambling, 
or the tide of corruption, is out, now 
is the time for you to flee. Do not 
wait for it to come back again. Be 
precipitate, and save your souls ! 

1365. Prompt Escape from Tempta- 
tion. — The cat that has caught the 
mouse plays with it as if she were its 
own mother before she devours it. 
And the most infernal habits paw 
their victims at times, and give them 
some space to run in before complet- 
ing their destruction. I have seen 
nimble mice that were wiser than 
their tyrant cat, and that, taking ad- 
vantage of their little space, shot into 
some crevice, and away, to the disap- 
pointment and chagrin of grimalkin. 



Are there not some here who have 
intervals, moments, when temptation 
plays them, and lets them go free.'' 
Shoot ! fly ! in those lucid moments, 
from besetting sins. 

1366. Knowledge Too Dearly 
Bought. — If there are any that have 
made up their mind to "know life," I 
say to them, Stop ! you may pay too 
dear for your knowledge. Men have 
looked into the crater of a volcano to 
see what was there, and gone down to 
explore, without coming back to report 
progress. Many and many a man 
has gone to see what was in hell, that 
did see it. Many a man has looked 
to see what was in the cup, and found 
a viper coiled up therein. Many a 
man has gone into the house of lust, 
and found that the ends thereof were 
death, — bitter, rotten death. Many a 
man has sought to learn something of 
the evils of gambling, and learned it 
to his own ruin. And I say to every 
man, the more you know about these 
things, the more you ought to be 
ashamed of knowing ; a knowledge 
of them is not necessary to education 
or manhood ; and they ought to be 
avoided, because when a man has 
once fallen into them, the way out is 
so steep and hard. Many a man has 
begun to climb the giddy cliff of refor- 
mation ; but, O, how few have suc- 
ceeded in getting over its brow ! 

1367. Perils of Temptation. — Lord 
Clive, when he got back to England, 
and was thinking of his administration 
in India, and reflecting how, after 
having conquered the provinces, he 
went into the treasure-house of one 
of the rajahs, and saw gold without 
measure (there silver was counted as 
nothing; it was always at a discount), 
and beheld baskets full of rubies and 
diamonds, was reported to have said : 
"My God! I tremble when I think 
of the temptation that 1 was under. I 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 295 



wonder that I came out honest." In 
looking back upon it, and thinking of 
it, he feared that it would not be safe 
to trust himself the second time under 
those circumstances. This is the 
testimony of a full-grown man in re- 
gard to an extreme instance of lia- 
bility to temptation, and you cannot 
tell, until you have been tried, what 
you would do in a given situation. 

1368. Evil, Always Evil. — I remem- 
ber watching, last summer, spiders 
that burrowed in the crevices of a 
trellis where the wind had borne much 
dust. I noticed that the hole where 
they lay lurking looked dark and 
ugly. I also noticed, as I sat one day 
watching, a vagrant spider take a 
morning-glory, in full blossom, and 
spin his web over the mouth of it. 
And there never was a prettier nest 
in this world — a nest more richly 
gemmed with beauty — than his was. 
But, after all, it was the same spider, 
whether he lay in the dark hole at the 
corner of the trellis, or in the blossom 
of that exquisite flower. 

Now, selfishness may weave its 
web in the dusky places, or in the 
hideous-looking recesses of a man's 
disposition, or about the mouths of 
graces and sweet affections ; but it is 
the same selfishness after all. The 
place is changed, and the appearance 
of the surroundings is changed, but 
the spider is not changed. 

1369. Silent Corrupting Forces. — 
Malarias are dangerous because they 
do not address themselves to any sense. 
We can put up lightning-rods to ward 
off thunderbolts ; but no man can put 
up rods that will protect him from a 
poisonous atmosphere. You can drain 
morasses that you can see ; but you 
cannot free the atmosphere above them 
from impurities that you cannot sense. 

Now, we are walking in a malarial 
atmosphere all the time : not one that 



attacks the body ; but one that infects 
the soul. The soul is poisoned all the 
time by pride, vanity, the love of 
money, greed, competitions, rivalries, 
and the various other noxious ele- 
ments by which it is surrounded. 
Human life is one vast Campagna, 
and there are, in the atmosphere 
round about men, silent, corrupting 
forces of which they are quite un- 
conscious. Nothing but inward spir- 
itual vigilance will make a man a 
match for these things. 

1370. Man's Temptableness. — Take 
a hemlock log ; five hundred pounds 
will not break it, but a thousand will. 
Take a pine log ; a thousand pounds 
will not break it, but two thousand 
will. Take an oak log ; two thousand 
pounds will not break it, but ten thou- 
sand will. Take an elm log ; ten 
thousand pounds will not break it, but 
fifteen or twenty thousand will. You 
can put weight enough on any log to 
break it. 

One man cannot be tempted by 
lust, but he can be by pride. An- 
other man cannot be tempted by 
pride, but he can be by avarice. 
Another man cannot be tempted by 
avarice, but he can be through his 
affections. Another man cannot be 
tempted through his affections, but he 
can be through his benevolent sym- 
pathies. Another man cannot be 
tempted through his benevolent sym- 
pathies, but he can be through his 
intellectual appetites and tastes. On 
one side or another, every man -is 
subject to temptation. 

1 37 1 . Inconspicuous Evil Influences. 
— In the long run those things are the 
most influential upon us which act im- 
perceptibly, but act all the time. In- 
fluences that work in us little by little 
are the formatory influences of life. 
Things overt and aggressive arouse 
our attention, our combativeness, our 



296 



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pride, or our conscience ; and often- 
times great and open temptations are 
the most harmless because they come 
with banners Hying and bands play- 
ing, and all the munitions of war 
in full view, so that we know we are 
in the midst of enemies that mean us 
damage, and we get ready to meet 
and resist them. Our peculiar dangers 
are those which surprise us, and work 
treachery in our fort. 

1372. Resistance to Temptation. — 
Think how, by means of immense 
dikes or banks, half of the kingdom 
of Holland has been reclaimed from 
the ocean. How like a vast spirit of 
evil that scowling enemy lurks, raging 
along the coast, and seeking in every 
bay and estuary and river to regain 
its lost possession ; but the same 
watchful eye, the same bold heart, the 
same industrious hand which put the 
ocean out, has kept it out. And is 
there not here an image of that lurk- 
ing foe, temptation, by which every 
man is beset ? If you would keep out 
the ocean of evil, you must throw up 
dikes of resistance ; and once having 
excluded it you can, by watchfulness, 
boldness and industry, keep it out. 

1373' Indirect Temptations. — How 
continually, in the science of war- 
fare, is it found better to outflank an 
enemy than to assault him in front 
and attack him in his power ! And 
how many, many men can, by side- 
way influences, be reached and out- 
flanked, who could not be successfully 
attacked to their faces ! 

1374. Danger of Alcoholic Drinking. 
— If every time vessels undertook to 
run through the narrow and turbulent 
passage from Long Island Sound to 
the East River, called Hell Gate, it 
was found that ninety per cent, ran 
ashore and but ten succeeded in 
getting through, by wheeling to, turn- 
ing about, sometimes going bow first 



and sometimes stern first, would you 
attempt to run a schooner or a sloop 
through there .-' You would not. 
And still less would you attempt it if 
you knew that only five, or even less, 
only one out of a hundred, of those 
that tried, got through. You would 
say that a man was a Bedlamite who 
suffered his property to go through 
such a pass as that. And yet, foolish 
and heedless men say, "I know it 
does not hurt me to drink." How do 
you know? Have you gone through 
your whole career? Do you know 
what is going on inside of you? Have 
you taken the statistics in regard to 
your liver and digestion ? 

1375. Deceitfulness of Temptation. 
— It is a part of military warfare to 
draw the enemy into ambush, giving 
him the hope of victory while he is 
being overtaken by defeat. We 
break ranks before our adversary ; 
we flee ignobly ; he pursues us, elated 
with the thought that victory is his, 
until he comes to some narrow pas- 
sage, when, behold, there rises before 
him and on either side his enemy ; 
and he is consumed in the moment of 
his fancied success. And how often 
are we led into ambush by our spiritual 
adversaries I 

1376. Yes, and No. — Yes is a 
precipice down which thousands have 
fallen and been dashed to pieces. 
A^o is a shield for the want of which 
thousands have been pierced through 
with temptation. The soul flattered 
and weakened by Yes, is like a city 
that throws open its gates to an 
enemy, and that, once having ad- 
mitted them, cannot regain its liberty. 
JVo is stern, but it has a sword-cut in 
its use which leaves the man that 
dares to use it on fit occasions like a 
warrior whom no one willingly attacks. 
He who knows how to say A^o to evil 
and Yes to good, unhesitatingly. 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 297 



frankly, has come far towards the 
end of his secular education. 

1377. Temptation Finds the Indo- 
lent. — When Satan would put ordinary 
men to a crop of mischief, like a wise 
husbandman he clears the ground and 
prepares it for seed : but he finds the 
idle man already prepared, and has 
scarcely the trouble of sowing ; for 
vices, like weeds, ask little strewing, 
except what the wind gives their ripe 
and winged seeds, shaking and scat- 
tering them all abroad. Indeed, lazy 
men may fitly be likened to a tropical 
prairie, over which the wind of tempta- 
tion perpetually blows, drifting every 
vagrant seed from hedge and hill, 
and which, without a moment's rest 
through all the year, waves its rank 
harvest of luxurious weeds. 

1378. Confession Lessens Tempta- 
tion. — It is wonderful what a safety 
there is, sometimes, in speaking out 
concerning the thing which is acting 
as an inflammation in your bosom — 
for many temptations are like fermen- 
tations ; they keep working, working, 
working ; and silence seems to make 
them work. As yeast works best in 
darkness, and as seeds sprout best 
underground, where the heat reaches 
them, and the light does not, so many 
temptations play in the imagination, 
and work in secrecy. But at times 
you will dissipate the temptation, you 
will disfranchise the danger, if you will 
make it a matter of confidence. Go 
to some one. Speak of it. You are 
too proud ? That is your only safety ! 
You are so proud that if you should go 
and tell another your trouble, after 
that your pride would keep you from 
running into danger. It breaks the 
charm, sometimes, to speak of a thing 
to yourself even, and still more to 
speak of it to another. 

1379. "Abhor that Which is Evil." 
— It is the spirit of resistance to that 



which is evil that is called hating; 
and where it is very intense, so as to 
excite the whole being, it becomes 
abhorrence. The very word, in its 
etymology, signifies that kind of 
affright which causes the quill or the 
hair of an animal to stand on end, and 
throws it into a violent tremor, and 
puts it into the attitude either of self- 
defence or aggression, so that every 
part of it is stirred up with a con- 
suming feeling. It is this that we are 
commanded to exercise towards evil. 

Is it not a dangerous weapon to put 
into a man's hands ? It is a. very 
dangerous weapon. So is fire a very 
dangerous element to have in a man's 
house ; and yet if, because it is 
dangerous, all fire should be put out 
on the globe, such is its connection 
with domestic and civilized life that 
society would go to ashes in a year ! 
We must use it ; but use it discreetly. 

1380. Temptations and the Lower 
Life. — It is very easy to shoot arrows 
down ; and they accelerate in speed 
at every single foot, because to the 
strength of the bow is added the at- 
traction of gravitation. And upon 
the heads of those who live low the 
bolts, the arrows of temptation which 
the devil throws down, fall with 
double force. But the men who live 
high have this advantage, that when 
the devil shoots up at them, against 
the force of the bow which drives the 
missile upward is the power of the big 
globe, which claims tribute of every- 
thing that flies in the air, and pulls it 
back again. And every foot the arrows 
go up, they go slower and slower. 

Men who live low down in their na- 
ture are within the reach of tempta- 
tions that spring from the fiery pas- 
sions ; but men who live far up in 
their nature ; men who think just 
things ; men who never permit their 
imagination to go out foraging, are 



298 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



boyoiul tlic reach of such tempta- 
tions. 

1381. Nature of Sin. — What is sin ? 
Generically I hold it to be this : where 
that part of every man which is ani- 
mal usurps the place of the reason 
and the moral sense. When men act 
by their animal appetites and passions, 
when they should act by the inspira- 
tion of reason and moral sense, they 
sin. Sin, in other words, has its 
sphere between the two elements in 
man, the upper and the under facul- 
ties. When the servile part of a man 
rises up and assumes authority, every 
single step is sinful, for it is deliberate. 
It isdethroningGod in the soul; making 
the animal stronger than the spiritual. 

1382. Sin, Fundamental in The- 
ology. — Although the grand archi- 
tectural facts of scientific theology are 
the existence, the will, and the gov- 
ernment of God, yet the fundamental 
fact is the sinfulness of man. That 
fact is to theology what disease is 
to medicine. Unless there were dis- 
eases, there could be no science of 
medicine. There might be a science 
of hygiene, but there could be no 
science of remedy ; and unless there 
were sinfulness in man, there could 
be no doctrine of repentance, of new 
birth, of atonement, or of Divine in- 
spiration and recuperative power : in 
short, almost nothing would be left. 

1383. Evolutionary View of Sin. — 
Sin is the remainder, as it were, of the 
conflict between man moral and spirit- 
ual and man animal. And this gives 
not simply a rational explanation that 
every man's reason can perceive ; but 
it takes away the idea from the ad- 
ministration of God that men were 
cursed in their birth without any fault 
of their own, and that they were being 
punished throughout all ages in this 
world on account of a sin that they 
never committed. Men do not be- 



lieve that, and I honor them for it. 
And see what a difference it would 
make in the preacher. When he goes 
on preaching about the fall of Adam, 
and posterity all of them falling with 
him, and that sin was the result of 
that great fall, men say, "Has not he 
finished his sermon ? he has been 
preaching now twenty-five minutes." 
You do not believe it ! But if a man 
stands before his congregation and 
says to them, " This is sin, the con- 
flict between your lower nature and 
your higher. You know what it is ; 
you know what you ought to do, and 
you know that the reason you do not do 
it is the animal temptations and seduc- 
tions and down-falling," — men hang 
their heads and say, " It is so, it is so ; " 
and he will have his audience with him. 
1384. Sin and Infirmity. — The 
Scripture says that sin is the violation 
of law. That is true ; but all violation 
of law is not sin. The nervous system 
is so distributed, and its filaments so 
run in all directions, that you cannot 
put the point of a needle on a man's 
hand and not touch a nerve ; and the 
laws of God are distributed throughout 
creation as thick as the nerves on a 
man's hand. All the way through 
life we are called into circumstances 
where our ignorance leads us to 
violate laws. Then comes pain ; and 
we have learned something — for every 
mistake in a man's life is revelatory. 
A man says that he could study six- 
teen hours a day ; but by and by 
down he goes with paralysis. Then 
he says, " I did not dream of that ; I 
have practiced studying so for years." 
He has violated a law ; but he did not 
intend to. There was no malice, no 
rebellion in the violation. The man 
has broken a law ; but what does 
Scripture call it when a man breaks a 
law not knowing what it is, and so 
breaks it unintentionally ? Infirmity. 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 299 



1385. Our Infirmities. — We have a 
High Priest who can be touched with 
a feehng of our infirmities. When a 
man walking in the street meets a 
neighbor, and smites him in the face, 
and lands him in the gutter, that is a 
violation of law both civil and divine ; 
but when a three-year-old child, being 
disappointed, slaps its nurse, that is a 
violation of law, but you do not knock 
the child into the gutter — you treat 
him very differently. He did not 
know ; he merely acted on an impulse, 
not on experience. There are a mul- 
titude of things of the same kind 
among grown men. The race is 
learning its trade, and all apprentices 
have to make mistakes in learning. 

1386. The Essence of Sin. — In the 
wrong direction or wrong application 
of our faculties, and in the inordi- 
nateness or excess with which they are 
used, lies the whole of sinfulness. 
There is not a sin nor a vice that is 
not the misapplication or excess of a 
normal feeling. Some teach sub- 
stantially that if a man has large 
secretiveness, he must be a thief ; 
that if he has large cautiousness, he 
must be a coward. You might as 
well say that because a man is ex- 
ceedingly ingenious, he must be a 
maker of false keys to open other 
people's doors ; or that because one is 
adapted to engraving and has great 
powers of imitation, he must be a 
counterfeiter! As though there were 
but one way in which secretiveness 
can act, and that the furtive way, the 
illicit way, the immoral way ! As 
though it were not a faculty world- 
wide in its beneficence ! As though it 
were not what walls are, to defend a 
city, or what veils are, to hide things 
sacred from the gaze of vulgar eyes ! 
As though it were not a divine feeling, 
lent for a divine purpose ! To use it 
for a wrong purpose is a sin. The sin 



is not in having the feeling, but in put- 
ting it to a wrong use. 

1387. The Evil of Evil Thought.— 
If a man covets, he steals. If he has 
murderous hate, he murders. If he 
brood dishonest thoughts, he is a 
knave. Society, to be sure, is less 
injured by these latent forms than by 
their overt expression, but the man 
himself is as much injured by cherished 
thoughts of evil as by its open com- 
mission, — and sometimes even more. 
There are good-seeming men who, if 
all their thoughts and feehngs were 
suddenly to be developed into acts, 
would run from themselves as men in 
earthquakes run from the fiery gap- 
ings of the ground. 

1388. A Double Life. — A man who 
is attempting to live a Christian life on 
one side, and a worldly life on the 
other, is like a sick man who has 
made up his mind that what the 
doctor says is all folly, and that, since 
he does not like the medicine and 
regimen, he will do that which is most 
agreeable to him. When the nurse 
and physician are out, he steals into 
the pantry, and loads his stomach 
with things aggravating to his disease. 
He deceives everybody but Nature ; 
Nature is never deceived. You may 
call food what you please, but if it is 
contrary to the law of digestion, when 
the stomach takes it. Nature knows it. 
You may call your course in life what 
you please, but when your conscience 
takes it, and its effects are evolved, its 
real character is disclosed, 

1389. Effort the Measure of Credit. 
— It is queer water that will not run 
down-hill. It is strange, when a man 
is so organized that he can be virtuous 
easier than anything else, and he runs 
down-hill in that direction, if he is not 
good to that extent. But where a man 
has the torment of a bad endowment, 
and he has made headway against it, 



300 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



he may be, in one sense, worse than 
you are ; and yet, God says that the 
pubhcans and the harlots will enter the 
kingdom of God before many of you 
will. If you could measure the de- 
gree of effort that they have put forth, 
and the light and the opportunities that 
they have had ; if you could measure 
the whole problem, and not merely the 
external surface of it, you would see 
that those who accomplish the least are 
sometimes deserving of the most credit. 

1390. Sin, the Dislocation of Facul- 
ties. — It is related of Dr. Sweet, that 
he had an almost marvelous power for 
setting bones. He would go, for in- 
stance, according to the fanciful stories 
told of him, to a patient that had lain 
bed-ridden for months and months 
with an afflicted joint, and seize the 
joint and give it one wrench, and then 
say "Get up! Walk!" and, sure 
enough, the patient would get up and 
walk with inexpressible gladness ! 
What was really a dislocated joint 
had been treated merely as a sprained 
joint, and the moment he took hold 
of it and put back the right bone into 
the right socket the patient was cured. 

Now, a man's faculties are out of 
joint ; they do not play in the right 
sockets; and the moment a man is 
translated into that state in which God 
lays his hand on the mind, and puts 
all the faculties where they ought to 
be, so that they will work with each 
other as they should, that moment the 
man is a newly created being : he be- 
gins to walk. 

1391. Sin Lies in Purpose. — All the 
doctrines that speak about sins as a 
kind of soot in the channels of a man, 
in the flues, as it were, of his life, as 
hereditary sins, or as imputed sins, are 
a part of the pagan nightmare of 
Mediaeval theology. Whoever does 
wrong, knowing that he does, and for 
a purpose, sins ; whoever neglects a 



duty, and knows it is duty, sins. The 
purpose, affirmatively or negatively 
violating God's law, is sinning. 

1392. Essential Criminality. — What 
is murder ? The law of the land an- 
swered in its way. Jesus replied, 
The voluntary indulgence of any feel- 
ing that would naturally lead to the 
act, — that is murder. The crime is 
first committed in the shadowy realm 
of thought and feehng. Many a 
murder is unperformed outwardly, 
while all that constitutes its guilt is en- 
acted in the heart. In the kingdom 
of the Spirit, feelings are acts. A 
murderous temper is murder. 

1393. Lower Pleasures Destroy 
Higher. — The thief has a pleasure of 
excitement in stealing. Even the rob- 
ber has some sort of pleasure in strik- 
ing down his victim. The miser has 
his curmudgeonish pleasure. There 
is pleasure in the cup, in the song, and 
in the dance. All these things have 
their pleasure ; but they are consum- 
ing the susceptibility of pleasure from 
other sources, by their concentration 
of intense excitements. Coarse pleas- 
ures have a brief period, and then 
they leave the soul in a wilderness. 
There is nothing remaining to it. 

A great place, the soul is. Ample 
provision is made in it for enjoyment. 
But he who lives for the senses takes 
only one kind of enjoyment, and so em- 
ploys that that it destroys all the rest. 

1394. Proneness to Evil. — There is 
a cat on a tree by my house. She 
went up last night clear into the top- 
most branches, and there she sits yet, 
for a cat cannot come down head first ; 
the claws were made to work the other 
way, and she has to turn round and 
back down. It is just the opposite 
with men. It is a great deal easier for 
them to come down than to go up. 
Their gravitation is constantly pulling 
at them, and pulling them down. 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 301 



1395. Evil Deeds. — A man in a 
rage might grind his watch to powder 
under his heel ; and it might be safely 
said that he had destroyed that watch; 
but it would not be destroyed one whit 
more than if, opening it and inserting 
a pair of nippers, he should take the 
hair-spring out. So far as its time- 
keeping capacity is concerned, it would 
be as effectually destroyed by the 
touching and disturbing of any of its 
springs or wheels as by the utter 
smashing of it. There is more than 
one way of doing evil. 

1396. Great Sins, and Little Ones. 
— Men, in their property, are afraid of 
conflagrations and lightning-strokes ; 
but if they were building a wharf in 
Panama, millions of teredos, so small 
that only the microscope could detect 
them, would begin to bore the piles 
down under the water. There would 
be neither noise nor foam ; but in a 
little while, if a child did but touch 
the post, over it would fall as if a saw 
had cut it. Men think, with regard to 
their conduct, that, if they were to lift 
themselves up gigantically and com- 
mit some crashing sin, they should 
never be able to hold up their heads ; 
but they will harbor in their souls little 
sins, which are piercing and eating 
them away to inevitable ruin. 

1397. Secret Sins. — You have seen 
a ship out on the bay, swinging with 
the tide, and seeming as if it would fol- 
low it ; and yet it cannot, for down be- 
neath the water it is anchored. So 
many a soul sways towards heaven, 
but cannot ascend thither because it is 
anchored to some secret sin. 

1398. Shortsightedness of Indul- 
gence. — A gypsy band that, by some 
freak of fortune, are turned into a 
magnificent mansion, well built, well 
furnished, and well stored with works 
of art, go to work and break to 
pieces the exquisitely carved furniture, 



pull down the rare pictures, and strip 
the house of all the valuable things in 
it, and burn them, in order to make 
their pot boil, and thus to serve their 
lower nature, until, by and by, the 
whole dweUing is desolate, and bleak, 
and barren. Men who reject religion 
and serve their passions, are doing the 
same thing. They are kindhng those 
lower fires at the expense of every- 
thing broad, and fine, and beautiful in 
their higher nature. And though the 
process may go on with some sort of 
success for a little time, it will not be 
long before they will be as bankrupt 
in secular things as they are in spirit- 
ual. The exceptions to this are rare. 

1399. Possibilities of Wickedness. 
— Men say, "It is impossible that I 
should have an emotion of hatred 
towards God, and never know it." 
There is such a thing as latent hatred, 
that must be inflamed before it will 
manifest itself. There may be fire 
raked up, as well as fire in full glow. 
There may be a susceptibility of heart 
that stands prepared, like powder in 
magazines, to be ignited. 

1400. Preparation for Crime.' — 
When Hazael killed the King of 
Syria, it is evident that it was only a 
spark that fell on tinder already there. 
No man can be tempted suddenly to 
great crime. It is contrary to the na- 
ture of the soul. There is to be a 
preparation for all great wrongs in the 
foregoing tendencies of the person 
that commits them. No man becomes 
a tyrant in a day, or a miser, or a 
drunkard. No person falls into any 
great extreme suddenly, as down a 
precipice. Men come to these things 
little by httle. And if Hazael de- 
liberately committed murder, he had 
thought about murder before. One 
man might kill another in a passion 
without having pondered the matter ; 
but no man ever deliberately killed 



302 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



another man who had not previously 
thought about it. 

1401. Cause and Effect. — Suppose 
a man, sowing cockle-seed on his 
farm, should say, " I have a good 
farm, and I am a good husbandman, 
and I am not particular about what 
seed I sow." Aren't you? Can you 
sow Canada thistles and reap wheat ? 
Can you sow burdock and reap aspar- 
agus ? What a man sows he reaps. 

1402. Corruptors of the Young. — 
Would you dare, if you were smitten 
by an infectious disease, to walk up 
and down among your fellow-men 
knowing that on every side you were 
sowing the seeds of death? Yet, 
there are many persons, brilliant, 
noble, large-minded, who, wherever 
they go and exert a controlling in- 
fluence, are dropping seeds in the 
souls of the young around them which 
shall take root and grow and bear a 
harvest of evil fruit. Woe be to the 
corruptors of the young ! 

1403. Criminality — Casual and Ha- 
bitual. — Crimes and vices may be of 
two kinds : they may be occasional, 
intermitting experiences, or they may 
be simple exponents of the general 
character. Where vices and crimes 
are pimples that indicate the habitual 
state of the blood, the man is cor- 
rupted all through ; but a man may 
now and then have a pimple when his 
blood is not very bad. 

1404. Cumulative Violations of Law. 
— The effects of disobedience are in a 
degree cumulative. One flake of 
snow does not make the least differ- 
ence on the Alps ; but one flake fall- 
ing on another, and another on an- 
other, night after night, by and by 
bring on the thundering avalanche 
which tells what snow can do ; and 
the effects of violation of law may be 
like flakes of snow or drops of rain. 
There are freshets and avalanches of 



pains and penalties. That is to say, 
the results of a constant breaking of 
law, unrepaired, unrepented, unre- 
stored, accumulate in men, though 
they do not know it until some unsus- 
pected shock loosens the avalanche. 

1405. Power of Repeated Acts, — 
Single actions may be insignificant, 
and yet, by repetition may become 
well-nigh omnipotent. There is noth- 
ing, I suppose, more feeble than a 
single strand of a spider's web. I 
read an account, only a few days ago, 
of a man who saw a very curious 
spectacle — that of a black snake more 
than a foot long suspended in the air 
in a perfect sack of spider's web. The 
spider was not a large one. It bore no 
proportion to its victim. Nor could 
he by any biting hurt him. But he 
had him drawn, little by little, into 
the air. Probably the serpent was 
torpid ; or the enemy was so small 
that the snake did not know that he 
was upon him. And the spider spun 
out of his bowel a little film, not a 
third part as large as the smallest silk 
thread that a woman uses withal ; and 
he dipped down and touched the 
snake with it, and it stuck. He took 
another little film, and touched him 
with that, and it stuck. He went on 
industriously ; and as the snake lay 
quiet, he put another and another film 
upon him. And as there was time 
enough, he added another and an- 
other, till there were a hundred, a 
thousand, ten thousand of them. And 
by and by these little weak strands, no 
one of which was strong enough to 
hold a gnat, when multiplied became 
strong enough to encase the victim, 
A million times stronger the snake 
was than that miserable little spider, 
and yet the spider caught him, and 
webbed him round and round, until 
when he tried to move he was held 
fast. 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 303 



I have seen men webbed by of- 
fences in that same way ; and no one 
of the offences was much larger than 
the film of a spider's web ; but at last 
the men were imprisoned and de- 
stroyed. 

1406. The Merry-Maker and His 
Soul. — A captain has lost his ship, 
and lost all his crew, and lost all his 
freight ; but he kept his decks clean, 
and fiddled every night for the amuse- 
ment of his crew ! What would you 
think of such a report as that of a 
man who was making a voyage ? 
Here are men that are wrecking 
everything for which they were made, 
and all they have to say is, that they 
chatter pleasantly and sing pleasant 
songs, and are quiet and pleasant 
neighbors. Judge ye of such men. 
Judge yourselves ! 

1407. Soul Exhaustion, — When a 
candle has burned down to the socket, 
it is not necessary that a man should 
open the door and let the storm rush 
and roar in to extinguish the light. 
He has nothing to do but to let it 
stand in the unmoving air. Every 
moment a little more and a little more 
of the candle is consumed, till nothing 
is left but a piece of the wick ; and 
soon that totters and falls over ; and 
now it burns but with the faintest 
flicker ; and at last, with one upleap, 
the flame goes out, and all is dark- 
ness. The candle does not need any 
help to destroy itself. Its life is self- 
destructive. And hundreds of men 
are simply living unto death. By set- 
ting aside principle, by disobeying 
conscience, by courses that involve 
no violent process, but a process that 
is self-exhausting, they are preparing 
themselves for a terrible account. 

1408. Flimsy Excuses. — It will be 
with men's excuses in the day of 
judgment, when God looks upon them, 
as it is with the frost-pictures on a 



window of a winter morning, when 
the sun looks upon them — they will 
be gone with his looking. 

1409. Men Heedless of Moral Dan- 
ger. — On shipboard, when the maga- 
zine is filled with powder, only a cer- 
tain set of appointed men are allowed 
to go to it ; and they are not allowed 
to go except after changing their shoes 
and putting on prepared socks, that 
there shall be no possible grinding of 
metal to cause the explosion of a sin- 
gle grain — for in the magazine one 
grain exploded takes a fellow-grain, 
and that takes ten more, and that a 
million more ; and the whole goes off 
in a heap. But men are gathering 
the powder of destruction in the mag- 
azine of their own soul and body, and 
they do not change their shoes, nor do 
they limit the men that go in and out. 
They do not blind the lanterns and the 
lights. They go with torches in their 
hands, scattering sparks. They treas- 
ure up wrath, and the righteous retri- 
bution of God : and the day of explo- 
sion will come. 

1 410. Lenten Truce with Sin. — I 
know a great many people who make 
up their minds that they will not com- 
mit certain sins during the whole 
period of Lent. For forty days they 
mean to be temperate, continent, 
moderate ; they mean to fast on sin. 
And what then ? Well, then, just as 
it may happen. And how does it al- 
ways happen ? Why, that they go 
headlong into sin again. They re- 
ward their great temperance, often- 
times, by going into indulgence more 
deeply than before. This is making a 
truce with sin ; it is making it. too, to 
the disadvantage of the man himself, 
generally. The only object of re- 
pentance is that you may become a 
different creature. 

141 1. Repenting of Outgrown Sins. 
— Here is a man who was subject, in 



304 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



the early part of his life, to passions 
which led him into immoralities. 
Now, that he has grown older, he has 
become sober, and left off these im- 
moralities. But his sobriety is not 
purity ; for he has taken on other im- 
moralities in the place of those which 
he has left off. And when his con- 
science is awakened, and he feels 
called upon to repent, he goes to the 
sins of his youth and repents of them. 
He finds this easy, because he has 
forsaken them already. This repent- 
ing of old sins, and not of present sins, 
is what I call Mount Vesuvius repent- 
ance, which consists in abandoning 
one crater, and opening another, 
while there is just as much lava and 
fire and fury within, only that hell 
breaks out on a different side ! 

141 2. Moral Judgment Important, 
r— Abhor what is evil everywhere, in 
yourself, in all your ways, in your 
household, in your neighborhood, in 
all social affairs, in your relations to 
society, in your business. Keep your 
judgment sharp and sensitive as the 
thermometer is to a change of temper- 
ature, or as the barometer is to the 
pressure of the air. Keep your moral 
judgment clean, clear and high. Be 
not overcome of evil, however insidi- 
ous or plausible it may be, though 
genius itself gilds it, and all wit and 
imagination make it beautiful. 

1413. The Downward Way. — Phi- 
losophers go to the glaciers, — those 
frozen rivers that move with a slow 
and steady pace down the mountain- 
side, — and set stakes on the firm 
rocks, and measure how far the whole 
body moves within a given length of 
time. By means of these unmoving 
stakes they can detect its almost im- 
perceptible but continuous motion, 
through day and night, and summer 
and winter, which the heedless never 
observe, nor believe in. 



Now, if you take your stand on the 
firm rock of God's truth, and watch 
men, I think you will see that they 
move with a slow and steady motion. 
There are men who are going down 
the sides of Mount Sinai as surely as 
the glaciers move down the sides of 
the Alps ! And I tell you it is time, 
not that men should watch each other, 
but that every man should wake up 
and watch himself. 

1 41 4. Critical Moments for Refor- 
mation. — Men struggling amid their 
misdeeds to do better are like sailors 
who, swimming through a boisterous 
sea, are striving to reach the shore. 
The very wave which carries them far 
up the sands, if help be not afforded, 
will return towards the deep and bear 
them out with it. The time for succor 
is when men yearn for a better life. 
He that has human sympathy has in- 
sight of such moods, and catches men 
at the very critical point of destiny. 

1415. Almost Saved. — I have seen 
in a picture sailors that had escaped 
from the wreck of a ship growing 
weary and weary and wearier. At 
last they touch the sand with their 
toes and begin to hope that they can 
creep upon the shore ; when just with 
faihng strength they are landing, up 
comes a wolf-wave behind them and 
sweeps them back with the undertow 
out to sea again. So sometimes are 
men longing for goodness and hoping 
for somebody to help them ; and 
temptations come running in after 
them to sweep them out. 

1 41 6. Destruction in Evil Courses. 
— The fact that one or two among a 
great many stop and turn back, and 
are cured, before it is too late, does 
not alter the argument as to the proba- 
bilities of the destruction of any man 
who enters upon evil courses. 

If ten travelers were to climb up the 
glaciers of the Alps, along the edges 



CONSCIENCE, TEMPTATION, AND SIN 305 



and cliffs of ice, and if, returning, one 
man, as it were, made drunk with ex- 
citement, should say, " I will not go 
back the way we came, but will take 
the slide and trust my luck," and 
should throw himself upon the glassy 
slope, and, though the probabilities 
were a thousand to one that he would 
be destroyed, should, contrary to 
every man's expectation, glide along 
the sides of ice with amazing velocity, 
and bound over the dangerous preci- 
pice, and land far below, and come 
off unhurt, do you think that the other 
nine men would look at him and say, 
" Because he has escaped I will try it 
too ' ' ? They would tremble with 
horror, rather, and say, " It was only 
by good luck that he escaped ; " and 
not one of them would follow him. 

1417. Great Natures Destroyed. — 
In the West you can ride through a 
long forest, and then come to a clear- 
ing. The settler takes his ax, at the 
right period of the year, and goes 
round and chops, just above the swell 
of the roots, a ring which stops the 
flow of the sap. The tree does not 
fall down immediately. During the 
first year it holds its branches and 
leaves. But there is no return of the 
leaf to it the next year. Then the 
weather beats upon it. And every 
successive year it stands with fewer 
and fewer branches. And at last 
some morning, after a great storm, 
it lies, its whole length upon the 
ground. 

Brethren, I see many men standing 
like trees, branchless and gaunt in a 
clearing, girdled, apparently. They 
are waiting for their overthrow. And 
it grieves my heart to see great na- 
tures, vast trunks, towering up, 
spreading abroad their branches, fit 
to have been pillars in the Temple of 
God, but girdled, and dead in tres- 
passes and in sins. 



1418. Insensibility to Evil. — I have 
taken notice, when I have seen men 
tapping a gas-main, that those who 
worked in the escaping gas all the 
time did not smell it, whereas those 
who but occasionally came near it, 
smelled it very sensibly. Men who 
are constantly in the stench of their 
own corruption never mind it. 

1419. Getting Accustomed to Evil. 
— Such is the nature of the stomach 
that whatever things are revolting to 
it, it rejects. It throws them off spon- 
taneously, and so saves itself. Yet it 
is quite possible for one, by minute 
tastes, to accustom himself to take 
arsenic, tartar-emetic, things the most 
destructive to the animal tissue and to 
all the functions of the prime organs ; 
it is quite possible for one, httle by lit- 
tle, to keep on in such a course until 
he has medicated himself into a cer- 
tain tolerance of things that are funda- 
mentally injurious to his health and to 
his life. And as it is in physical 
things, so is it in moral. By grada- 
tions of wickedness, by not looking at 
it with horror in its initial forms, in its 
shghtest developments, one may as it 
were tone down his conscience, and 
bring it more and more to the level of 
wickedness, until it shall lose its sensi- 
bility and its power of discerning. 

1420. Persistence of Deeds Done. — 
In an evil hour a man forges ; and 
then he is led to do the same thing a 
second, a third, and a fourth time. 
His false paper is passed, and as it 
comes around he takes it up, until the 
whole circle is completed. For there 
is any quantity of men besides those 
in Sing Sing that have been forgers ; 
only they have had the good luck not 
to be detected in the crime. They 
were not sick, and no accident befell 
them, so that they were able to get 
the paper back into their own hands. 
The man burns the evidences of his 



3o6 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



guilt, and goes on prospering for five 
or ten years ; but there is one thing 
that never ceases to trouble him. He 
says, " I could be happy if it were 
not for those four or five notes. I 
have been an honest man since that 
misstep, but I would give all the world 
if I could wipe it out." You cannot 
wipe it out. There is no way in which 
a man can undo a deed once done. 

1 42 1. Repentance and Reformation. 
— Repentance may begin its work in- 
stantly, but the completion of the 
reformation requires a sphere of years. 
If one could wallow amidst filth for 
half a life, and then wash himself 
clean in a day, sin would be no worse 
than dirt on the hands, which water 
can cleanse in a minute. Sin would 
be robbed of half its danger if it were 
curable in a moment, 

1422. Tampering with Evil. — 
When fishermen are on the shore 
looking for bass and buUfish, they are 
accustomed to chop up a great deal 
of bait when the tide is right, and let 
it float out as a kind of lure. And 
the fish, that have a kind of tele- 
graphic communication of their own, 
pass the word round, " There is some- 
thing to eat ; " and they come flock- 
ing up in shoals ; and one seizes one 
morsel, and another another morsel, 
and another another ; till by and by 
the cunning fisherman puts a morsel 
on a hook and throws it out. And 
soon some unsuspecting fish comes up 
and takes it, hook and all, and pres- 
ently he is flopping on the shore ! 

It is just so that the devil fishes for 
men. There is this morsel here, and 
that morsel there, which men take 
with impunity ; and they think there 
is no danger and wax bold ; and by 
and by they get hold of a morsel with 
a hook in it. It is not wise to feed 
where there are evil fishermen about, 
fishing for souls. 



1423, Reprobation. — One of the 
final mischiefs of wickedness in this 
world, is, that men become reprobate. 
Some persons are opposed to that 
word ; but there is such a thing as a 
man's going on and perverting him- 
self to so great an extent, morally, 
that there is not within his reach the 
means of recuperation. Can you 
tamper with the eye until you have 
destroyed its organization ? Can you 
tamper with the tongue, till it ceases 
to perform its legitimate functions ? 
Can you tamper with the physical 
structure, till its nerve-sensibility is 
unfitted for the offices which it was 
designed to fulfill ? Can you tamper 
with the intellectual structure till it is 
all awry, and reports falsely ? So 
can a man tamper with his tastes, and 
his affections, and his moral sensi- 
bilities, till they cease to have their 
normal action. 

1424, Propagation of Evil, — Evil is 
eternal in the sight of God, unless it 
be checked and cured. Sin, like a 
poisonous weed, resows itself, and be- 
comes eternal by reproduction. 

1425. Single Responsibility. — If a 
firm succeeds, the gain is distributed 
to each partner ; but if it fails each 
one may be held for the whole loss. 
Whoever commits or connives at a 
public sin will bear the blame, as if 
he alone did it. Public guilt always 
has private endorsement, and each 
man is liable for the whole note. 

1426. The Strength of Evil. — If 
God should refuse to interrupt the 
course of men, they would scarcely 
know the strength of their resistance 
to him. It is not when the cable lies 
coiled up on the deck that you know 
how strong or how weak it is ; it is 
when it is put to the test, and is made 
to sing like the chord of a harp, in 
times when the ship is imperiled, and 
the waves are beating fiercely against 



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307 



it. And it is only when men are 
brought to the test that they can tell 
what their real nature is, or how 
strong their instincts and passions are. 

1427. Reformation Manifests Evil. 
— There is a stream that has a smooth 
channel and runs without noise ; if 
you let it alone it will continue to run 
without noise ; but build a dam across 
it, and there will be commotion at 
once. Let a man's evil thoughts run 
smoothly, and he does not see that he 
is a very bad man ; but lay across the 
channel of his will the restraints of 
God's law, and the faults and infeHci- 
ties of his nature will appear. 

1428. Meanness of Intelligent Sin- 
ning. — A dog, even, feels itself laid 
under a debt of gratitude by kindness. 
It is only men who are so corrupt 
that they would ever think of making 
goodness, and generosity, and kind- 
ness towards them the ground and 
reason of a base requital. And yet 
hundreds say, "God is good, and we 
will go on a little while longer in sin." 

1429. Sin against God. — When a 
man defrauds you in weight, he sins 
against you, not against the scales, 
which are only the instrument of de- 
termining true and false weight. 
When men sin, it is against God, and 
not against his law, which is but the 
indicator of right and wrong. 

1430. Sin against the Divine Par- 
ent. — There are a great many children 
that will sin against the family arrange- 
ments who would not sin against their 
mother. The mother says, " My dear 
child, you know your father has made 
a law in this family that such and such 



things shall not be done, and you 
know you have broken that law three 
or four times ; now, for my sake, 
avoid breaking it again;" and the 
child feels, when the mother inter- 
poses herself, that there is something 
that touches him which did not when 
it was only a law of the family. 

Now God puts himself in just that 
position. Though we are sinful and 
wicked, he in his infinite compassion 
and mercy forgives us, and says, " Do 
not sin against me nor against mine," 
It is this conception of sinning against 
God as a person, that has always 
been the most powerful restraint with 
me, and that I have found to be the 
most powerful with other men. 

1 43 1. The Sinner Needs Qod. — 
Your sinfulness is not a reason why 
you should keep away from God. It 
is the very reason why you should go 
to him. He is to your soul what the 
physician is to your body. When 
your body is racked with pains, you 
go to the physician. And so, the con- 
sciousness of your sin, and of the hate- 
fulness of it, is the very reason why 
you should go to God. 

1432. Release from Evil Bondage. 
— If there be those that are bound 
hand and foot in evil habits against 
which their whole nature revolts, let 
them cry out — O Thou that didst come 
to open the prison doors, and to break 
the chain and the shackle, wilt thou 
not look upon thy captives ? And by 
thy supernal power wilt Thou not lift 
them out of the turmoil of evil, and 
the stress of temptation, and the in- 
vincibleness of habit ? 



XXVI. RELIGION 



1433. Religion is Right Life. — It is 
not well for a man to pray cream and 
Uve skim-milk. 

1434. Earth Connection with 
Heaven. — By a wise adaptation of 



electricity an organ can be played 
many miles away, under certain con- 
ditions. If the keyboard is connected 
with the battery, and the wires run, 
no matter how far, even hundreds and 



3o8 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



thousands of miles, if the battery be 
properly charged, and the wires run, 
say to New Orleans, the organist sit- 
ting here may thunder there the ma- 
jestic tones of an anthem. If you 
consider that the human soul is a bat- 
tery, and that all its wires run into the 
heavenly land, there are many incon- 
spicuous persons living in the world 
of whom we see and hear and know 
nothing, but from whom to heaven 
wires go, and around whose souls are 
angel assemblies gathered together 
chanting joyful songs. 

1435. The General Confession. — A 
man will confess sins in general ; but 
those sins which he would not have 
his neighbor know for his right hand, 
which bow him down with shame like 
a wind-stricken bulrush, those he 
passes over in his public prayer. Men 
are willing to be thought sinful in dis- 
position ; but in special acts they are 
disposed to praise themselves. They 
therefore confess their depravity and 
defend their conduct, making them- 
selves to be wrong in general, but 
light in particular. 

1436. Self- Knowledge. — Men con- 
duct their worldly business cautiously 
by keeping accounts, and knowing 
just how they stand ; or they conduct 
it loosely and run into mistakes, and 
into bankruptcy. So he who keeps an 
account with his own soul, as the cen- 
ter and source of his whole life, is like 
a careful merchant who knows the in- 
come and the outgo, the whole condi- 
tion, of his affairs ; but he who keeps 
no account with his soul is like a 
scheming, speculative man who is al- 
ways prospering in his own notion, but 
whose substance is all the time leak- 
ing away, and who is losing the very 
power of wealth. 

1437. Transient Aspirations. — Have 
you never traveled, of a summer's 
night, belated, after darkness had 



fallen, and the storm had made the 
blackness more intense? Your road 
is hidden from you. Every now and 
then there comes flaming through 
the air the illumination of the light- 
ning ; and for an instant you see the 
mountain, the hill, the valley, the 
road, everything; but after the flash, 
deeper darkness settles down upon 
you. By and by the flash comes 
again, and then again the darkness 
shuts you in. There are a great many 
who live under the influence of mixed 
and irregular ideals, whose aspiration 
is very transient. There is just enough 
of it to rebuke their way of living. 

1438. Evanescent Fancies. — What 
is more beautiful than the morning- 
glory in the morning, which, as if na- 
ture loved it and tricked it with her 
fairest jewels, is set, on every line and 
lineament, with exquisite pearls? And 
when the sun glances on it, what leaf 
is more beautiful, what vine is more 
graceful, what blossom is finer in tex- 
ture and color and form, and what 
adornment is rarer, than those of this 
flower? But ere ten o'clock has come, 
it has all collapsed, its pearls have ex- 
haled, its form has shriveled up, and 
its glory has passed away ! And what 
are our best intentions of the will but 
morning-glories, that, ere they are 
fashioned, are gone, and — forever ? 

1439. Soul-Sickness. — I see men 
who are retiring from business, on ac- 
count of nervous depression, over- 
work and over-anxiety ; and they 
nurse themselves, and care for them- 
selves, and every morning look at 
their tongue, and every day feel of 
their pulse ; and the road between 
them and the doctor's house is beaten 
hard. Yet they have been a great 
deal worse inside. If they could see 
their soul's portrait, they would see 
that they are sick enough there. But 
they never went to a doctor on ac- 



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309 



count of their soul. They did not 
care much about that. 

1440. The Empire of Thought. — 
"The ground of a certain rich man 
brought forth plentifully ; and he 
thought within himself " 

What an empire is this thinking 
within one s self! The sphere of 
thought is the sphere of true liberty ! 
We cannot walk where we please, 
but we can think as we please. We 
cannot act as we choose. Customs 
restrain like walls. A man is obliged 
to hmit his conduct, but every man 
possesses an interior hberty. Out- 
wardly he cannot spread his wings 
like a bird and fly to the uttermost 
parts of the earth, but inwardly he 
can fly as he pleases. There is, too, 
a vast difference between what a man 
does and says, and what he thinks 
within himself. Oh, how many thefts 
a man thinks within himself! How 
many base jealousies ! How many 
stupid ambitions ! How many disal- 
lowable pleasures a man dallies with 
in his thoughts ! What excursions of 
the imagination ; what wondrous cre- 
ations of this architect of thought ; 
what a realm, wider than the scope of 
the heavens, broader than from ho- 
rizon to horizon ; what an illimitable 
realm is that which a man's silent 
thoughts traverse, and traverse so 
easily that there is no sound in their 
going, and so suddenly that there is 
no time occupied in their passage ! 
The vast circuit of this immeasurable 
globe man passes easily, leaving no 
footfall, making no track, always find- 
ing new paths. 

1 44 1. Human Nature Without Re- 
ligion. — The land is, in its native state, 
overgrown with forests, choked with 
underbrush, and cumbered with fallen 
and decaying materials. The sun is 
always hidden from its interior. It is 
apt to be a lair of beasts — a refuge of 



wolves, and bears, and foxes — of owls, 
and hawks, and uncomely things. 

This is certainly the state of the hu- 
man soul before religious culture is 
applied to it. It is eminently so of the 
barbarous and heathen nations of the 
earth, which are gigantically fruitful 
of growths — but of wild growths, use- 
less or pernicious, or both. It is so, 
in a modified sense, of the thousands 
of men in Christian communities who 
are but externally restrained by Chris- 
tianity, and whose passions, appetites, 
and habits are gross, and untamed. 

1442. The Natural and the Religious 
Life. — If you will walk with me in 
January over the fertile places in the 
fields, and through the forests, you 
will see what man is in his natural 
state. The earth is full of roots, not 
one of which knows how to live. The 
trees are full of buds, every one of 
which is closed and bandaged so that 
it cannot expand. All things are pop- 
ulous, but curdled, congealed, re- 
strained. Although, in his natural 
state, man is full of high, godlike 
powers, yet they are in a condition of 
bondage and inactivity ; and the com- 
ing of religion to him is like the com- 
ing of spring to the soil and the for- 
ests, when all things begin to grow. 
When a man attains some degree of 
ripeness in his spiritual nature, he 
may be hkened to the fields and the 
forests in midsummer ; and when he 
has passed through life under the 
stimulating influences of religion, he 
may be likened to plants and trees in 
autumn, when they yield their fruit in 
abundance, and in perfect ripeness. 

1443. Two Theories of Religion. — 
There are two radical ideas prevalent 
in the world as to the design of reli- 
gion. One school teaches that this 
world is a poor worn-out ship, which 
never can be more than patched up, 
and that religion, instead of being a 



310 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



power to reconstruct the world, and 
to bring it to a perfect form before the 
throne of God, is a lifeboat to get as 
many as possible off from the old 
world-ship before it goes down, carry- 
ing with it the remainder. 

The other theory teaches that while 
individual men are being saved by 
the Gospel, this is but a part of a great 
scheme by which the world itself is to 
be evangelized, so that this world 
shall one day stand before the eternal 
throne and the admiring assembly of 
heaven a perfected civil society. Now 
this second idea I accept with all my 
heart. 

1444. Power from Obedience. — 
There is no liberty like that of obedi- 
ence to God's laws. Once, when the 
electric currents were flashed in the 
North, they were dreaded in the 
storm ; they were phenomena of 
beauty or terror : but we have found 
out a good deal about electricity, we 
have found out its nature, much of it, 
and what do we do now ? We say, 
" Serve us ! " and it gives light to our 
dweUings and casts its beam down 
upon our streets. We say to it, " Go 
under the sea!" and away it goes. 
We have made a postboy of that 
which savage men yet dread and do 
not know what to do with. The mo- 
ment men know what it is, and sub- 
mit themselves to its necessary condi- 
tions, it turns right round and serves 
them, and they are stronger by the 
whole strength of the natural law. 

1445. Religion not a Make-Shift. — 
Are there any of you who have been 
thinking that before you died you 
would attempt to be religious? Do 
not think that religion is something 
that you can put on or off as a gar- 
ment. Religion is a state of the soul. 
The kingdom of God is within you. 
Have you thought that sometime you 
would put it to proof .^ Why not now ? 



1446. Postponing the New Life. — 
What do you wait for? Do you wait 
for youth to pass? When I would 
bring to a friend a pleasant gift from 
my garden I do not wait till the rose 
sheds its leaves, and pluck the re- 
mainder for that friend : I give it to 
him while it is in its highest state of 
freshness and beauty. And would 
you bring to God, the greatest, the 
dearest, the noblest, the best of friends, 
your soul after the bloom of youth is 
dropped and you have come into the 
years of decay ? 

1447. Religion in Time of Trouble. 
— " What need you of religion? " some 
say. "Are you not in good health? 
Are you not married most fortunately ? 
Are you not the father of a family 
most beautiful and healthful and prom- 
ising ? Can there be anything that a 
man wants more than you have all 
around about you ? " 

And so a man might say to the ship- 
master : " Why do you lug about that 
huge metal chain? Of what earthly 
use is it ? Have you not fair winds ? 
Are not your sails ample ? Is not your 
voyage prospering?" And yet, by 
and by, the time comes when the ship- 
master is glad to take refuge from the 
open sea, in some near bay ; and he 
throws the chained anchor overboard. 
Down it plunges, seeking the dark 
recesses of the sea below. Some few 
bubbles only are there to tell you 
where it is. But by and by the ship 
begins to draw upon the cable, by 
which, stiffening and growing taut, 
the ship is held steadfastly. It is just 
what the shipmaster wants in foul 
weather. 

1448. True Christianity. — Christian 
character is an automatic state of 
benevolence. It is a state of benevo- 
lence so full that it overflows, not upon 
consideration and measure, but as a 
lamp sheds its light abroad. 



RELIGION 



311 



1449. Weakness of Esthetic Reli- 
gion. — There are men whose idea of 
piety is largely shaped by the esthetic 
feeling. Nothing seems to them to be 
good that is not symmetrical, harmo- 
nious. Taste, rather than benevolence, 
is their divinity ; and every fault dis- 
gusts them. I love beauty and regu- 
larity, too, where they are under the 
guidance and inspiration of a disinter- 
ested benevolence ; but where they 
are substitutes for it, I abhor them. I 
would as soon undertake to raise my 
harvest by the pale moonbeams instead 
of the glory and fervor of the sun, as 
to undertake to raise anything like 
character, or give it power in the 
world, by the esthetic principle. 

1450. Sentiment and Ethics. — Those 
who exalt sentimental religion, and ig- 
nore practical, ethical hfe, are like 
men who would improve ship archi- 
tecture by cutting away the hull till it 
is no larger than a shingle, and spread- 
ing the sails till they are as big as the 
whole harbor. 

1 45 1. Objections to the Christian 
Life. — There is no pleasure which any 
self-respecting person should indulge 
in that is not heightened by the love 
of God. There is no resplendent im- 
agination, no trait of genius that is not 
rendered more blessed in the service 
of God than outside of it. I would 
not invite any man to circumscription. 
"Well, then," you say, "do I not 
need to take up any sort of cross? " 
Yes, it is necessary to take up a cross 
to gain anything. A child takes up a 
cross to learn the alphabet ; but when 
he has mastered it it is no longer a 
cross to him. It is a great cross that 
a person takes up who learns to play 
on the piano ; but when he has learned 
to do it it is no longer a cross, but a 
pleasure. There are many desirable 
things the beginnings of which are 
difficult. The beginnings of a Chris- 



tian life are difficult, but the work 
grows easier as it progresses. 

1452. Poor Church Members no Ex- 
cuse for Other Men. — A great many are 
repelled by the way in which some 
church members live. But because 
the man over on the other side of the 
street is a drunkard or quarreler, you 
do not any the less believe in temper- 
ance and forbearance. Because he 
is squalid you do not abandon neat- 
ness. Because he is a criminal you 
do not any the less cultivate good 
citizenship. And though men in the 
church do not live right, what has that 
to do with you? 

1453. Religion Ever-Living. — Some 
tell me they do not believe in religion 
because of the way that men act in 
Wall Street ; because they see elders, 
and deacons, and ministers even, do- 
ing wrong things. Of course they do 
wrong. They would not be in the 
human body if they did not. But go 
and see what mothers bear for sons. 
Go and see, in miniature, that same 
atoning sacrifice which Christ fulfilled, 
in those who literally give their life, 
living it, giving it, for the unworthy, 
the poor and the needy. Do you tell 
me that religion is dying out ? It 
blossoms everywhere. Every house- 
hold is full of it. Every village is 
filled with it. Orthodoxy, the exact 
statement of things, may be shattered ; 
church order may be changed ; but 
never will religion die out until the 
human soul is void of love, joy, peace, 
long-suffering, goodness, faith, meek- 
ness, and temperance. 

1454. Salvableness and Salvation. — 
I have heard an evangelist stand be- 
fore an audience as large as this, with 
one single cry, "Who wants to be 
saved ? who wants to be saved ? ' ' 
Never once, " Who wants to be 
worthy of salvation ? ' ' Well, one got 
up. " Thank God, thank God, there's 



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one that wants to be saved." Down 
with his name ! He goes into the 
church. Afterwards, he has a sober 
face on Sunday, and runs in about the 
same wrinkles of selfishness and pride 
that he ever did. You smile at this, 
but are you not smiling at your own 
folly ? Analyze it, and look close at 
it. Are there not many of you that 
are living in that way in your religious 
career, trying to enjoy the things that 
are best in this world, and lowering 
an anchor out to windward so that 
you shall not go on the rocks when 
you come to die ? 

1455. The Religion Acceptable to 
All Men. — There is no disHke of the 
qualities that Paul enumerates ; and 
they are said to be the fruit, in the 
summer of divine providence, of the 
shining of the Spirit of God. Though 
a man may say that he hates botany, 
no man ever hated the beautiful flower. 
A man may say that he hates pomol- 
ogy ; but no man ever refuses to sit 
down and eat apples. A man may 
say that he hates the church, theology 
and religion (these outward manifesta- 
tions of it are imperfect at the best) ; 
yet, when you come to see the qualities 
that are the substance of religion, in 
your mother, in your wife, in your 
sister, in any friend or neighbor, — the 
heroism of self-denial, the beauty of 
tender love, the glory of honor and 
truth and fidelity, and the courage to 
wait, and to believe without the sight, 
you recognize them as heroic qualities; 
and true religion is heroism in the 
sight of all men. 

1456. Religion not Mysterious. — 
Do not think that as puerile cere- 
monies initiate men, and they know 
not what they must go through before 
they are initiated and become mem- 
bers of a lodge, so religion has some 
dark places or some mummery that 
men have got to go through, and 



hence shrink from the unknown. Re- 
ligion lies upon the very plane in 
which you look upon human life in 
every other department. The thing to 
be done is large and difficult, but only 
in such ways as all attainment in all 
directions is difficult, requiring in- 
dustry, purpose, continuity, courage. 

1457. Fruits of the Spirit Make 
Christianity. — Manhood in the Christ- 
spirit, is Christianity. There are some 
ways in which men can attain this bet- 
ter than others ; but any way that 
brings a man into that state is safe. 
The common school is certainly the 
more hopeful means for diffusing edu- 
cation among the people ; but many a 
slave has learned to read lying on his 
belly, by the dim light of a log fire. 
Many a man has gone to college and 
come out as much a sheep as the skin 
in which his diploma is written ; and 
many a man who has not been to col- 
lege has educated himself in scant 
leisure hours. When a man is edu- 
cated, he is educated. The thing is 
to /lave the Christian spirit ; it makes 
no difference how one gets it. 

1458. Feebleness of Wills. — The 
will is Hke a rudder. Some ships are 
very hard to steer, and some are very 
easy. Some you can hardly turn 
from their course, and some you can 
set about by the least touch of the 
wheel. So it is with men. There is 
a great difference between one man 
and another, in the power of carrying 
out a resolution. Some men never 
resolve anything that they cannot 
execute ; and some men can never 
execute anything that they resolve. 
And these last say, " I do not dare to 
pray ; I do not dare to tell God the 
same things over and over, while I 
continually give the lie to my words." 
So, on account of this feebleness of 
will-power, many persons are dis- 
couraged. Nevertheless, their souls 



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313 



must be saved. They must go to 
heaven with the saihng apparatus 
which God has given them. 

1459. Social Effect of Feeling. — 
Nothing is more electrifying than 
strong feelings, where many persons 
are congregated. Grief, and mirth, 
and anger, and patriotic inspirations 
without number — these, when men 
are gathered together under circum- 
stances favorable to their diffusion, 
roll up in tides of feeling, as waves of 
the ocean roll. There is nothing more 
common than such effects ; and they 
are just as common in moral as in any 
other kind of feelings. If there be no 
wisdom of control under such circum- 
stances, it may all end as a kind of 
moral intoxication. This is frequently 
the case with strong religious develop- 
ments which, having no guidance, 
lead to nothing. But if there be some 
one present who shall direct the feel- 
ings to right channels and practical 
results, they will revolutionize the hfe, 
not of individuals alone, but, often- 
times, of whole communities. 

1460. Natural Religion. — If a man 
is sick he is perfectly at liberty to get 
well without a doctor and a nurse if he 
can. If he cannot, then the doctor 
and the nurse are appropriate. If a 
man can live, and spiritually live, 
without Divine help, there is no reason 
why he should not — none at all. If a 
man wishes to go to New York, and 
he prefers to throw off his coat and 
swim across the East River, there is 
no law against his doing it ; but I 
think after having done it once or 
twice he would be cured of the desire, 
and would take to the conveyances 
that are provided. 

1 46 1. Theology not Religion. — 
The reduction of spiritual facts to an 
intellectual form is no more a repro- 
duction of those spiritual facts than an 
analyzed man, with his nerves on a 



board in one place, and his bones in 
another, and his intestines in another, 
and his blood corpuscles in another, 
is a living man — any more than a 
flower, reduced to ashes that you may 
know its elements, is a flower. 

1462. Religion and Manhood. — Re- 
ligion is not merely a ticket to be used 
at the gate of heaven to let a fellow in. 
It is not a pohcy of life insurance, so 
that a man, when he gets up there, 
pulls out his certificate of church- 
membership, and the gate-keeper 
steps aside, and says, " All right ; go 
in." Religion is the consummation 
and perfection of manhood. 

1463. Receiving and Giving. — The 
essential spirit of religion is like a 
mirror, that takes beams of light, but 
reflects them all, instead of absorbing 
them. Men come to a higher level of 
moral life when, having received 
benefit through morality, or obedience 
to lower laws, and having attained en- 
largement and illumination by the in- 
fluences and instruction of a church 
life, they begin to say to themselves, 
"I am living selfishly; I am all the 
time being fed, I ought to feed some- 
body ; I am being taught, I ought to 
teach somebody." 

1464. Devotion and Piety. — We 
must not confound devotion with 
piety. The one is the means : the 
other is the result. The one is the 
fire : the other is the food which it 
cooks. Devotion is merely a method 
by which you attempt to enkindle in 
yourselves spiritual life. It is not 
piety ; it is the instrument of it. A 
man may read his Bible, the Prayer- 
book, and devout treatises, and give 
much time and attention to religious 
services, and yet be far from piety ; 
just as a man may whirl a millstone 
and have no grain, no flour. 

1465. Religion the Soul's Health, — 
There are a great many persons who 



3H 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



think, " I must take care of my re- 
ligion." They have got something 
that they call religion, which they con- 
ceive needs to be guarded. Just as if 
I should say, " I must take care of my 
health," and should yet neglect my 
body, so that my nerves were out of 
order, and my heart was out of right 
beat, thinking that I had something 
distinct from the body, which was 
health ; whereas health means a body 
acting right in every one of its parts ! 
And religion is to the soul what health 
is to the body, — it is the right ordering 
of all the faculties. 

1466, Religion Misunderstood. — It 
is a folly for a man to take the pleas- 
ure of the world first, and then get re- 
ligion afterwards. Men think religion 
is what to the half-drowned man a cup 
of brandy is. It will bring him to. 
It is a transient enthusiasm that lifts 
him over some bar at the mouth of the 
river of life, and when once he is in- 
side he is safe. What a total perver- 
sion this is of the real truth, that this 
life is given to a man as a university, 
and that the task and problem that 
lies before every man is the right un- 
folding of himself up from his lower 
nature to a higher life into his spiritual 
and eternal hfe ; and that this is an 
educational work so complex and so 
large, that a man needs all his ener- 
gies and all his time to attain to any 
eminence in it. 

1467. The Equivalent Theory of 
Heaven. — A great many persons have 
supposed religion to be a gloomy 
thing, in which a man was to earn, by 
so much suffering here, an equivalent 
of joy hereafter. If he only bear his 
lot here and deny himself, it would all 
be kept an account of, and over against 
it would be so much glory and so much 
peace and so much triumph hereafter. 
What a heathen philosophy that is ! 
As if crosses could be weighed out by 



scales as sugar and coffee can ; as if, 
over against so much suffering, one 
should have so much equivalent and 
artificial and imposed joy ! 

1468. The Two Vital Laws 

" Thou shall love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, AND thy neighbor 
as thyself." That conjunctive particle 
is a rivet that holds these two sen- 
tences together inseparably. Each 
element is necessary to the completion 
of the other. But men turn the feint 
of Solomon to a reality, and cut in two 
these vital members of the one life. 
Thus we have devout men full of re- 
ligiousness, but caring little for their 
fellow-men ; while over against them 
are superficial philanthropists, full of 
fussy zeal for humanity, without love 
for God, or solemn depth of reverence. 

1469. Critical Decisions. — When I 
ask men to come and talk with me on 
the subject of religion, and tell them 
that whether they do or not may de- 
cide their destiny, they sometimes wag 
their head, and say, " Do you suppose 
God governs the world upon such a 
mean and narrow plan that a man's 
destiny depends upon whether he does 
or does not go and talk with another 
man ? " I know that when a train is 
going at the rate of sixty miles an 
hour, it depends upon whether the 
switch is one-tenth part of an inch one 
way or another, whether the passen- 
gers are swept into destruction, or run 
along smoothly, without knowing that 
they are in danger. It is at these crit- 
ical points that small things become 
omnipotent. When you have put on 
one side of a scale one hundred pounds, 
and on the other ninety-nine pounds 
and ninety-nine hundredths of a 
pound, one hundredth of a pound is 
of as much importance as all the rest 
of the weight. It is when but the least 
things are required to turn the scale, 
that such things become momentous. 



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315 



1470. Caution in Religion. — With 
respect to worldly things, men believe 
in enthusiasms, and say, " Strike 
while the iron is hot." There are all 
manner of maxims and cautions 
against delay where there is a chance 
for gain in material things. But when 
it comes to religious life men say : 

" Now my friend, do not go too fast. 
Look out, or you will be carried away 
by excitement." The man walks 
along the edge of a precipice, and no- 
body says a word ; but when he walks 
by the lower side of a cliff, men say, 
" Don't tumble up ; beware — beware! " 
As if men were in danger of being 
over-pious or over-good ! As if that 
were a besetting sin of men ! 

1 47 1. Self-Examination Advisable, 
— If you weigh the sum total of all 
that you raise on an acre of ground, 
you will find that nineteen parts out 
of twenty are straw and husk and 
stubble, and must be thrown away ; 
and you may think yourself well off 
in saving the twentieth part. It is a 
great deal better that nineteen parts 
out of twenty of men's essays in self- 
examination should be mistakes, than 
that they should not undertake to ex- 
amine themselves at all. 

1472. Partial Christianity. — " Is not 
a man Christianized all over?" Not 
necessarily, by any means, any more 
than a house is heated all over. For 
piety is a furnace that God puts in 
you. It has power to heat the whole 
dweUing, but if you do not open all 
the registers it will heat only the halls 
and those rooms where the heat is let 
on. A man may have Christian mo- 
tives for one side of his being, only. 

1473. Righteousness a Natural Law. 
— I say, " God organized this world 
for health." Men hearing me say it 
laugh, and point to the hospital, and 
say, " Is that evidence that the world 
w^s organized for health?" I say, 



" Yes ; the hospital is the best emblem 
in this world that God punishes men 
for the violation of the laws of health." 
Now I say in respect to righteous- 
ness, that it is the Divine law of the 
world, and that it has been from the 
beginning ; and if you point to the 
squabblings of men, and the disturbed 
condition of human affairs, and say, 
" Great evidence of righteousness!" 
I say, as in the case of the hospital, 
that the fact that men have been made 
wretched and miserable for not obey- 
ing this law, is evidence that it is the 
law by which the world is governed. 
If it were not, there would be no 
penalty for its violation. 

1474. Morality and Piety. — There 
has been a sharp distinction made be- 
tween morality and piety, and there is 
a difference. Morality is the begin- 
ning of spirituality. I have just been 
beholding with fresh delight the 
achievements of the magnolia, which 
in spring carries at its very top the 
bright white cup, as if it were filled 
with the very ether and essence of 
sunlight and fragrance. And yet that 
cup, holding itself so, is dependent on 
that homely, dirt-colored root at the 
bottom. Destroy the root and you 
will destroy the cup. All the way 
from the bottom clear up to the top 
there is this perfect unity of organiza- 
tion and evolvement, and as the sweet 
censer of fragrance and beauty in the 
tree is intimately connected with its 
root, so morality and spirituality are 
one, only at different stages and posi- 
tions of growth. 

1475. Piety and Morality. — Love to 
God is piety ; love to man is morality. 
Morality is a lower form of love to 
God. We show our love to God by 
keeping his commandments. The 
love of God is only a higher and more 
resplendent form of loving our fellow- 
men. They are but different periods 



3i6 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



of growth on the same substantial 
root — love. 

1476. Doctrine and Destiny. — It 
is said, " How can God accept a 
man but in Jesus Christ?" Oh, fools! 
I should think you had been brought 
up in a mechanic's shop where Col- 
lins's axes were made, and that you 
had the idea that no axes would sell 
which did not have "Collins" 
stamped on them. Do you suppose 
that God is working on so small and 
mean a scale as that ? Do you sup- 
pose he looks for this name or that 
name, this sect or that sect? The 
question is not whether a man calls 
himself a disciple of Christ, but 
whether he is Christlike. ... It is 
not your doctrinal system, it is what 
your doctrinal system has done in you 
and upon you, that determines your 
destiny ; and if, when you have done 
your best, you come far short of the 
final state which you are seeking, you 
will be saved by the bounty, by the 
grace, by the generosity, by the love- 
element in God, which ministers to 
you and takes care of you all the way 
up to the day of your death. 

1477. God Found through the 
Heart. — I have talked with old colored 
men, who, storm-driven, have gone to 
God, because they had nothing else 
to go to, and who had a richness and 
wonderfulness of experience that I had 
no parallel to in myself, though I was 
a preacher, and my business was to 
study. A God that you have studied 
out can never be such a God as you 
have felt out. 

1478. The All-Important Element. 
— I have seen men build a greenhouse 
for their choice plants in winter, and 
it was important whether they built 
of wood or iron ; it was important 
whether they had glass for the light to 
come through or not ; it was impor- 
tant what the plan should be, and 



how many platforms there should be : 
but suppose, after having built their 
house, and filled it with rare exotics, 
tremulous ferns, and what not, they 
should forget to put a furnace in ; and 
suppose in January there should come 
a frost, and destroy every plant, what 
would it avail for them to say, " Well, 
my glass was all right, the ribs were 
all right, the panels were all right, the 
platforms were all right, the plans 
were all right, the house was built as 
it should have been"? Yes, it was 
built as it should have been, but it 
ought to have been warmed ; and if 
the furnace was left out you might as 
well not have built it at all. A perfect 
religious system without the fire of 
love is good for nothing. 

1479. Difficulty Proportioned to 
Fineness. — The law of creation is that 
the higher forms of development re- 
quire more labor than the lower. 
Religious life becomes more difficult 
in proportion as it comes up higher. 
It is not very hard for a woodsman to 
cut down a tree. It is not very hard 
for the mill owner to saw it up. The 
old saw rips through it and sings all 
day long. It is not very hard for a 
man to bring it up into the shop and 
cut out the rough furniture. When it 
is cut up the difficulty grows, and a 
little more as it is cut out and as the 
fitting comes ; and when the fitting 
and the rough dressing are over, then 
begin to come the real difficulties. It 
has got to go through the finer proc- 
esses, and the last hand that puts the 
last touch of beauty and polish upon 
it is the rarest hand in the whole force. 
There are five hundred men that can 
do rough cabinet work where there is 
one man that can do the artistic and 
finer cabinet work. That is true of 
every department of human life. It is 
easy to begin those things, but the 
difficulties increase ; and I think a 



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317 



true man of God never feels so little 
like a true man as when he is nearest 
like it. The sense of that which re- 
mains to be accomplished is greater 
than the sense of attainment. 

1480. Scope of Christianity. — A 
man buys a farm to raise potatoes, rye 
and barley ; and for some years he 
does this. But it is ascertained that 
there is a ledge of very good stone for 
building purposes. " It is my farm." 
He uncovers the ledge and begins to 
send into market the stone, increasing 
his wealth thereby. But as he is ex- 
cavating stone he finds a vein of gold. 
" The gold is mine ; I didn't know it 
when I bought it, but behold, I am 
making myself rich with this stone, 
and now more abundantly with this 
precious treasure that I have found in 
it." If further it is discovered that in 
the gravel may be found rubies and 
diamonds, or any other thing, they are 
his. The fact that he did not know 
it and that he did not come to them 
for years, does not touch the question 
of ownership. And because men in 
the earlier periods of Christianity did 
not know what Christianity meant, nor 
what it could produce directly or in- 
directly, is no reason why these things 
do not belong to Christianity. All 
these elements have come with the 
growing centuries ; and there is ten 
thousand times more excellence upon 
the earth within the scope of Chris- 
tianity than there ever was in the day 
it was born ; but these all belong to it. 

1481. Things of Good Report. — 
There is a foundation of conscience, 
of manliness, in the community at 
large ; there are certain great stable 
virtues on which society itself is built ; 
and Christianity recognizes them all, 
and makes it a part of our duty and 
privilege to so adjust our lives and 
dispositions as to include those quali- 
ties that make a man estimable in the 



sight of his fellow-men. If you are 
racing, be the best man on the ground. 
If you are an athlete, among all the 
thousands around you, do your best, 
because you are a Christian man. 
Whatsoever thing is estimable, praise- 
worthy, excites admiration for cour- 
age, for quickness, for patience and 
long-continued endurance — those be- 
long to Christianity. 

1482. Negative Morality. — A farmer 
goes to the agricultural fairs, and he 
says, " I have a farm that I want to 
put in competition. It has not a weed 
on it — not one ; it has not a Canada 
thistle ; it has no purslain ; it has not 
a dock ; it has no plantain ; it has not 
any mullein. There is not a weed on 
it, absolutely." "Well," it is asked 
him, " what are your crops ? " " Oh, 

I — I " "Have you any wheat?" 

"No." "Any corn?" "No." 
" Any grafts in the orchard ? " " No; 
I have nothing of that kind — but I've 
got no weeds." And that is all ! 

There are a great many people who 
seem to think that religion is not doing 
wrong. As if a knitting-machine that 
never knit any stockings would be 
considered good because it never mis- 
knit ! 

1483. Positiveness of Religion. — 
The derivative meaning of the word 
religion is. To be bound ; to be tied 
up, as by allegiance ; and the fulfill- 
ment of it, in a large part of the globe, 
has, unfortunately, been literal, and 
men have been tied tip. The idea 
has been, very largely, that when a 
man became a Christian, he agreed 
with himself to give up dancing, and 
swearing, and gambling, and lying, 
and Sabbath-breaking, and dissipa- 
tion, and bad company ; and his 
creed, if he were to let it out, would 
be, " I will not do this, I will not do 
that," till by and by it will be as 
knotty as a pine plank sawn out of a 



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RELIGIOUS LIFE 



small tree. Negatives are not to be 
derided nor despised ; but a man who 
has nothing but negatives is a fool, 
and has no temperament, no vitality, 
no positiveness. A man who has 
nothing more than nots is nothing. 
To be anything he must have actual 
virtues. 

1484. The Christian Life a Life- 
Work. — The development of one's na- 
ture is a life-work. It cannot be 
gained by dreamers, nor can it be 
done at a jump. Miners go out pros- 
pecting with pans, and spade, and 
shovel, and hunt every gorge, and try 
every soil and every ledge, hoping 
they will strike something here or 
there. Happy are they if they do 
strike a lode ; they have got it now, 
and they are rich ; they will sell out or 
work it, as the case may be, with the 
help of others ; but, for themselves, 
their life-work is done. 

Religion is not to be had by pros- 
pecting. It is a whole life's work. It 
never grows much easier so far as at- 
tainment is concerned. It may grow 
happier, and it does ; but it never at- 
tains. " Not as though I had already 
attained," saith the Apostle, who was 
one of the noblest specimens of hu- 
manity, "but this one thing I do, I 
press forward towards the mark, for 
the prize of my high calling." 

1485. The Loving Atmosphere. — 
Let all your deeds be done in love. 
As this great rugged globe, with all its 
jagged hills, hirsute with forests, 
shagged all over with bush and 
thicket, and rolling in an atmosphere 
of light, seems to those who look upon 
it in far-distant planets as round, and 
smooth, and radiant as their bright 
orbs seem to us, so the robust and 
rugged aspects of a true manhood, 
revolving in an atmosphere of Chris- 
tian love, are smoothed and softened 
to the most attractive beauty. Strength 



in every part, and love round about 
all, is the receipt for manhood. 

i486. Spontaneous Virtue. — A true 
Christian is like a well-plumbed house. 
. . . He has but to turn on the faucet, 
and rivers and wells are at his service. 
An untrained man is like a family in 
the lower countries where one has to 
go to the distant spring to bring in 
every bucket of water he uses for culi- 
nary purposes. What we want is not 
to have to pump up right feeling, at 
the right time, but to have the right 
feeling, as it were, in the very struc- 
ture of the soul, ready to flow. 

1487. Excitement and Incitement. — 
The law of the faculties runs straight 
through the whole congeries of feel- 
ings. Religion comes first, as a high, 
transient feeling, instead of a continu- 
ous working feeling of a lower grade. 
. . . The good man takes his primary 
feeling into the second form, in which 
it works in him, day by day, till he has 
organized his life upon it. The bad 
man, after having experienced feel- 
ings in their primary state, merely 
feels that he has been played upon. 
When he goes out of the church he is 
like a violin whose bow is hung up. 

1488. Emotional Nature of Religion. 
— The nature of religion must be a na- 
ture of emotion. For, although re- 
ligion employs the reason, the reason 
bears to it the same relation that a 
pair of spectacles bears to the eyes. 
It is not the eyes. It is merely a help 
to the eyes. And religion is in the 
heart, and not in the understanding. 
Technically, it is reverential, filial 
love. It is not, therefore, theology 
that is religion. The higher form of 
heart-emotion constitutes religion. 

1489. Religion and the Church. — 
There is just the same difference be- 
tween religion and the Church, with 
its ordinances, that there is between 
knowledge and a schoolhouse. The 



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319 



schoolhouse is a place where you get 
knowledge, but it is not knowledge ; 
and the Church is a place where you 
get moral influence, but the Church is 
not moral influence. The Church 
and its ordinances are merely instru- 
ments of religion. Plows and spades 
make crops, but they are not crops, 

1490. Lost and Found. — No one 
(not even Dante) ever had such a 
vivid sense of what it is to be without 
God in the world, and to be a child of 
wrath and darkness, as the Apostle 
Paul had. If you go through his 
writings, and collect his intimations 
and affirmations on the subject, you 
will be struck with the magnitude and 
dreadfulness of his conception of the 
state of being lost and sought out and 
found and restored. He had, all 
through his life, the feeling that he 
had been as one suspended over a 
mighty abyss, and that in an unex- 
pected hour he had been grasped and 
brought back to safety again. And 
he never forgot the shock. He never 
got rid of the impression which was 
produced upon his mind. 

1491. Religious Despair. — I have 
been called to many cases of persons 
who "knew that they were repro- 
bated " ; that they had lost all hope of 
salvation. I knew one of the prede- 
cessors of my father in the ministry, 
old Father Champion, who believed 
he had sinned away the day of grace. 
He was in such a religious condition 
as might be fairly classed under the 
head of religious insanity. It is said 
of him, although in most every direc- 
tion his mind was sane, in that one 
direction it was false to the true. And 
he used to say : 

"What shall I do when I get to 
hell?" 

He did not know what he could do, 
until one day there was a slight resili- 
ency, and he said : 



" I know what I will do ; I will start 
a prayer and conference meeting." 

I think such a one may be safely 
trusted there. 

1492. Half-Hearted Religion, — Half- 
way measures are always disturbances. 
A man who is halfway between being 
sick and being well is never a very 
happy man, and is never a very 
profitable man to look at. And just 
like these men are they who are at- 
tempting to be veneered with religion. 
They are just far enough advanced 
from their worldly courses to be all 
the time vexing and harassing them- 
selves with moral obligations, which 
sometimes they meet and obey, and 
which sometimes they evade. And 
men are not happy under such cir- 
cumstances. There is a sort of har- 
mony which brings peace where a man 
surrenders himself wholly ; where a 
man gives himself entirely to Christ, 

1493. Genuine Religion Enjoyable. 
— A man who by famine has been 
driven to a mouldy loaf of bread, 
munches it in his hovel with avidity ; 
and there comes a friend to him, and 
says, " Let me take you out of your 
misery. Throw away your loaf, and 
come with me," "Throw away my 
loaf?" says he. "I cannot spare 
this." But once bring in the food 
smoking from the oven, and set it be- 
fore him, and how quick will he throw 
away his garbage ! 

Once bring the true relishes of holi- 
ness into a man's soul; once let the 
real life of Christ spring up in him ; 
once let a man know what joy there 
is in disinterested kindness ; once let 
a man follow Christ in suffering for 
another ; let a man deny himself; let 
him and his wife and children— his 
whole household — deprive themselves 
of real comforts of life, in order to 
carry light and balm into a distressed 
household over the way ; and let 



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them talk it over together at night, 
and speak of the gratitude of those 
who have been reheved, and of the 
wondrous thanks of the Httle children 
— and how much nobler they feel ! 

1494. Improvement Honestly Mis- 
judged. — To this day, and in high 
places, and among educated men, in- 
deed — (men in one sense educated ; 
for a man may be scholastically edu- 
cated, without being educated morally 
and spiritually) — you shall find those 
who are in most serious and honest 
alarm because persons are breaking 
away from the modes of religious cul- 
ture to which they have been accus- 
tomed. They suppose such persons 
are breaking away from all religion, 
simply because they have come to a 
higher sphere of development in it. 

We may imagine that a devout 
heathen, a conscientious idolater (there 
are such ; there were always such) 
cannot dissociate religion from the 
use of charms, from idols, from su- 
perstitious observances ; and if a na- 
tive near to such an one forsakes the 
gods of his fathers, and turns to Je- 
hovah and to Jesus, and the other 
does not, the convert may seem as if 
he was abandoning all religion. He 
t's abandoning the only religion that 
this heathen man knows about. 

1495. Courtesy in Christian Life. — 
I call your attention to a significant 
feature of religion as you will find it 
set forth in the epistles as well as the 
life of Christ, if you look them through 
— its gentlemanlitiess. I know of no 
other word that will express the idea. 
Not only were the apostles themselves 
— and Paul conspicuously — men of 
the utmost courtesy, in the highest 
sense of the word, but there is not a 
vulgarizing maxim in the New Testa- 
ment. There is not one that the most 
polished and noble soul does not feel 
to be the expression of its highest 



want. "Mind not high things," said 
Paul, " but condescend to men of low 
estate." A true Christian man, a real 
gentleman, while he speaks to his 
neighbor's child, and to his natural 
companions, will never let any one 
pass that he has access to, without 
courtesy — and more, as men need 
more. Courtesy in life should be such 
that they shall have most kindness 
who need most ; but kindness is so 
distributed in society that those who 
need the most have the least. 

1496. Emotion Not Religion. — Men 
there are whom a hymn will set al- 
most spiritually drunk. Hymns which 
come sighing through the passages of 
memory to them, and in which they 
hear the voices of father and mother, 
and brethren and friends beloved ; 
hymns that hft the soul up into the 
memory of all the assemblies in which 
they have been sung — to sensitive na- 
tures, to moral natures, such hymns 
frequently give wings by which they 
fly away so high that they forget to 
come back again to the ground and 
perform their duties. They sing them- 
selves into the air, — and there they 
stay. I have seen persons that had 
so exhausted themselves by religious 
emotions that they had no strength 
left for religious duties. 

1497. Religious Emotion Pernicious 
if Not Practical. — If persons go to the 
drama night after night, and have ad- 
miration carried up very high, or in- 
dignation carried out very hotly, and 
all the amenities of life placed before 
them — then what ? Are they any bet- 
ter at home ? Are they any better 
neighbors ? Do they do anything with 
it? It is a smoke, heat ; it is a bon- 
fire ; and it wastes. But if the emo- 
tion could be communicated to some 
practical part of life, if it could be 
converted into being, and doing, and 
living, it would not hurt them. AH 



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high pleasures that do not in any way 
take hold of practical life, reform it, 
elevate it, make it better, make it 
easier to be bright, noble, strong, 
kind, helpful, useful, are pernicious in 
the long run. This is just as true in 
regard to religion as to anything else. 

1498. Strong Phrases for Strong 
Feelings. — Men whose God is fear or 
conscience, rather than love, go 
crouching in their prayers to God, 
begging forgiveness, and talking about 
being worms, and about being clothed 
in a righteousness that is as filthy rags, 
and using such debasing images as 
these. It is perfectly right for a man 
once to use figures like those ; a man 
may be so lifted up, for instance, in 
the day of battle, that he shall say, 
properly, " I was a god at that mo- 
ment " ; we forgive him in such a 
case, because in the ecstasy of con- 
centrated feeling a figure like that but 
poorly represents the consciousness 
which he had of power ; but suppose 
that, walking among men and among 
his children at home, a man should go 
about saying, every day, " I am a 
god, I am a god"? That which is 
proper as an extraordinary and intense 
emotion would be absolutely abomina- 
ble when used every day. 

1499. Is Religious Excitement In- 
decorous? — It is no argument against 
religion to say that there is excitement 
in it. But it is said, "Is it not bad 
taste ? Does it not lead to a thousand 
grotesque experiences?" If one will 
only walk once or twice through the 
geometric gardens of Europe, he will 
see what men understand by fine 
taste. There he will see one tree 
shaped like a dove, another like a 
pyramid, and others like gate-posts. 
He will see long rows of trees shaped 
just alike, and forming arches as far 
as the eye can reach. He will see 
canals, with appropriate water-falls. 



where every drop goes over marble 
just so, and every stone is polished 
and decorous. Gentlemanly water- 
falls they are. Everything is very 
fine ; everything is after a given pat- 
tern ; and the pattern is for the most 
part geometric. And that is what is 
called taste and dignity. And a per- 
son who has been trained in that idea 
of taste, on going into our native for- 
ests, would be shocked to see those 
brown leaves in yonder heap that my 
feet delight to tread upon, and that are 
full of suggestions and music. There 
are bugs on the trees, as sure as I 
live ! And there are birds singing in 
the branches. In Paris, birds are kept 
in aviaries, and in wire cages, and are 
taught to sing properly. But these 
birds of the forest are uncultured, and 
fly hither and thither at will. And 
here is a tree that lops over a brook, 
and looks as though it were going to 
fall. And this foreign-bred gentleman, 
seeing it, would say, " If I had that 
tree I would make it stand up. Trees 
were never made to be crooked." 
Here is a stream that runs and winds 
as it pleases, observing no rules of ex- 
actitude or regularity, and his sense 
of propriety is offended. Here are all 
these objects of interest, following the 
directions which are natural to them, 
full of instruction and inspiration, but 
this man despises them, and says, 
" They are not in good taste." 

1500. Conservativeness in Religion. 
— Many men are determined to be so 
safe ! Ah, conservatism is such an 
important thing ! Prudence, modera- 
tion — these are all-important in their 
estimation. " Let your moderation be 
known," say they. Moderation? Why 
there is no such moderation anywhere 
on earth as in an ice-house. Things 
are never disturbed there. All is 
proper there. There are many per- 
sons who would conserve by congela- 



3^2 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



tion. But not so is it in the tropics, 
where fruits abound, and grow luscious 
from every bougli. Not so does ex- 
perience dictate. I\lcii who have 
made their mark in this world have 
been men that had fire in their souls. 
But it is said that the dignity and the 
sacredness of religion require sobriety 
and moderation and propriety. Yes, 
1 think that, too. The dignity and 
sacredness of religion are real. But 
there is a dignity of Summer as well 
as a dignity of Winter. There is a dig- 
nity of bounty as well as of frugality. 

1 501. Religious Fervor to be Regu- 
lated. — It is true that intense excite- 
ment in religion sometimes leads to 
rashness and fanaticism, as very rich 
soil, besides producing the crop, tends 
to produce an immense harvest of 
weeds ; but would you say to the 
farmer, " Barrenness is the best cure 
for weeds ; do not raise anything, and 
then you will never have any weeds " ? 
I would say, " Run your cultivator 
between the rows, and cut down the 
weeds and let your crops grow. The 
fact that the weeds want to grow is a 
hint of what soil there is." So, faults 
of over-expression and intensity are 
more frequently the results of mis- 
direction and adverse influences, than 
of too much feeling. 

1502. Christianity Judged by Its 
Professors. — Comes there to me an 
embassy from a royal house in sack- 
cloth, and smeared with dust, to 
represent a great king ? He must 
account for it that he fell among rob- 
bers, and that he had a hard fight, 
and then show his vouchers, and I 
will believe that he is an ambassador. 
Ordinarily a king's servants represent 
a king by their demeanor, by their 
beauty of apparel, and by the abun- 
dance of the treasures that they bring. 
What do you represent? What do 
you people think of Christ's care of 



his family when they see you, queru- 
lous, anxious, sleepless, nerveless? 
You, without the quiver of a song ; 
you, without one sparkle of effer- 
vescence ; you, with the smoke of a 
wick just as it is expiring and ex- 
tinguished, but not with the brightness 
of it — what is to be thought of Chris- 
tianity when men see you ? 

1503. Influenceof Visible Goodness. 
— I take a botany and begin to read 
to my boy about stamens, sepals, and 
pistils, and all manner of leaves, and 
stems and roots — the whole physiology 
of plants ; and I say, " Now, Robert, 
go out and raise plants." Well, he 
may go, if he must. Instead of that, 
I say to him, " Come here, my boy " 
— and, holding up before him a 
bouquet of flowers, I say to him, 
"What do you think of that?" 
" Ah ! " he says. Everybody loves 
flowers. Even the poor little ragged 
beggars of the street cry for them. 
When I go along with them in my 
hand, they run after me, and say, 
" Mister, won't you give me a flower ? " 
One flower shown to a quick-eyed 
boy will do more to make him a 
gardener than a thousand botanies. 

Now, that is the very idea of 
the Gospel of Christ which he sets 
forth when he says, " Let your light so 
shine before men that they shall glorify 
God by becoming good themselves." 

1504. Everyday Goodness. — As 
flowers never put on their best clothes 
for Sunday, but wear their spotless 
raiment and exhale their odor every 
day, so let your Christian life, free 
from stain, ever give forth the fragrance 
of the love of God. 

1505. Beauty of Holiness. — "What- 
soever things are lovely.'' It is not 
only our duty to be right, and to be 
just, and to be pure, but it is our duty 
to be so in such a way that we shall 
seem lovely to men. 



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323 



There is no apology needed for the 
rose — it is its own apology ; the grapes 
in a vineyard make themselves mani- 
fest to every passer-by ; and every 
man to be a Christian after Christ's 
method should so live that when per- 
sons look upon him they shall say, 
" It is lovely ! It is beautiful ! " 

1506. Working Piety. — I have 
noticed that the slender brook which 
carries the mill is more musical on 
Sunday than on any other day ; be- 
cause the mill stands still, and the 
brook, having nothing to do with its 
water, gurgles over the rocks, and 
flounders over the dam, and makes a 
thousand times more merry noise than 
on any other day. But Monday 
comes, and the gates are hoisted, and 
the mill runs, and the brook is not so 
musical ; but the mill is more so. 
And Christians, as it were, play in the 
spirit, and have a holy jollity, on 
Sunday. It is a holiday for them. 
Nor would I undervalue their experi- 
ence or joy. But I say that they are 
not so busy when they sing and pray 
and rejoice in the sanctuary, as when, 
by some moral power, they are com- 
bating temptation, and resisting pride, 
and overcoming selfishness. 

1507. The Meek Possessing the 
Earth. — I suppose there is no class 
among us that more exemplify a cer- 
tain principle of the words of the 
Gospel than the Quakers. Their 
houses and their lands are proverbial ; 
and they themselves, as a general 
rule, have the look of the meek. They 
look as though they had possessed the 
earth ; and a very fat earth, too. 
They are generally persons who thrive, 
who live at peace, who are universally 
respected ; and they do extract as 
much honey from this great Avorld- 
flower as any other class of people in 
the whole community. And is it not 
irresistibly evident that their pros- 



perity is the natural effect of a cause 
— the moral ideas that they are Uving 
on ? And does not the one flow in the 
train of the other ? 

1508. Creeds and Religion. — There 
are multitudes of things that are most 
useful ; but even if you should change 
your creed to-day in the growing light 
of an advancing civihzation you do 
not touch your religion, any more 
than a man who changes an old 
plough for a new and better one 
changes agriculture. It is an instru- 
ment, and all doctrinal creeds are 
mere instruments ; but the things that 
they are to produce are love, joy, 
peace, long-suffering, gentleness, good- 
ness, self-government. 

1509. Living Epistles. — If your 
circumstances are making you very 
unhappy, try to make somebody else 
happy, and you will find what light 
will arise upon you. Do not live for 
yourself; live for others. It will be 
one of the testimonies to the reality of 
religion which cannot be made in any 
other way so easily and so eft'ectually. 
A chemist sits down with his class and 
says to them : " Darkness is the 
subject on which I shall discourse. 
Darkness is nothing ; it is the mere 
absence of light " ; and so he gives a 
chemical and philosophical statement 
of the fact that all darkness dies the 
moment light comes into the room. 
Now a cheaper way would have been 
simply to light a candle — that would 
settle the whole thing. Men are teach- 
ing religion, not living it. 

1 5 10. Tokens of Divine Intercourse. 
— Should one come home with fruit 
we say, " Thou art come from the 
orchard;" if with hands full of wild 
flowers, "Thou art from the field ; " 
if one's garments smell of mingled 
odors, we say, " Thou hast walked in 
a garden." But how much more, if 
one hath seen God, hath held converse 



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RELIGIOUS LIFE 



of hope and love, and hath walked in 
heaven, should he carry in his eye, his 
words, and his perfumed raiment, the 
sacred tokens of divine intercourse ! 

151 1. Intolerant Toleration, — Chris- 
tian toleration is not an enforced for- 
bearance with men who teach error. 
Some men keep their hands off from 
errorists because the law will not let 
them touch them. They would burn 
them if they could, but they do not 
dare ; and that they call toleratio7i ! 
That is the same kind of self-denial 
which boys practice when the fruit 
hangs ripe and tempting in the gar- 
den, and they will not touch it be- 
cause the stone wall is so very high 
that they cannot climb over. 

1512. Associating with Those in 
Error. — " Well, but, is there not to be 
a distinction between truth and error, 
and between good men and bad 
men?" Oh, yes, righteousness is to 
be the distinction. A better spirit is 
to be the distinction, a truer, deeper 
love ; more disinterested zeal ; purer 
spirituality. The distinction between 
a man and his fellow-man is not to be 
in the shape of his hat, nor in the cut 
of his coat, nor in the color of his 
garments. 

1 5 13. The Test of Preaching. — 
There is a difference in agriculture, 
and there is a difference in imple- 
ments ; but the farmer that raises the 
best wheat in the greatest quantity, 
and constantly, is the best farmer, no 
matter what his tools are. It stands 
true that he might be a better farmer 
if he had better tools ; but he that 
gathers the most men, and draws 
them into the truest Christian life, I 
care not by what doctrine he may be 
known, nor in what church he may be 
found, is God's man that is set to 
preach the Gospel of Christ, accord- 
ing to the spirit, the genius and the 
temper of the Gospel itself. 



1514. The Righteous Man. — To- 
day, when I came down from my 
place in the country, I observed the 
trees along the Hudson River ; and, 
seeing how green, succulent and 
plump they were, I said, •' They must 
have had rain down here, anyhow ; " 
but it instantly occurred to me that it 
was said in the Psalms that the right- 
eous man should be like a tree planted 
by the rivers of water. There it was ! 
The roots ran into the Hudson ; and 
they did not want any rain. 

1515. Atmospheric Christianity. — 
Once, when I was talking with Edwin 
M. Stanton (one of the noblest men 
that the late war brought forth), in 
speaking of the superior fighting 
qualities of Sheridan, whom he char- 
acterized as our young Napoleon, he 
said, "When he was in a fight he 
carried around him an orb of fire five 
feet in diameter." I have thought, 
frequently, that a Christian ought to 
carry around him an atmosphere of 
fire, or magnetism, so that everybody 
who comes within five feet of him 
shall feel a genial, warm, kind, divine 
element of love and benefaction. 

15 16. The Christian in the World. 
— The shining of a man's light is not 
to be merely for his own family. It 
would be a stingy man indeed who 
would not set a light in the window 
when there was no other light to guide 
the traveler along a difficult way, 
saying, "This candle is for me and 
my children, and we are not going to 
waste any of its rays on the dark 
street for we know not whom." 
There may be stinginess in respect 
to the light of the heart as well as in 
respect to the light of a candle. 
There is to be such an emission of your 
religious experience that the hearts of 
others shall be kindled by yours, and 
that they shall receive benefit from 
you of comfort, guidance, sympathy. 



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325 



1517. Good Deeds. — In the even- 
ing, all over the trees, and throughout 
the grass, is deposited the condensed 
moisture of the air ; and silent dew- 
drops are on every flower and every 
leaf. If you go and look at them in 
the darkness of to-night, there is no 
form or comeliness in them ; but by 
and by God will have wheeled the sun 
in its circuit so that it shall look over 
the horizon ; and the moment its light 
strikes these hidden drops, small and 
scattered, every one shall glow as if 
it were a diamond, and all nature 
shall be lighted up with myriad fires, 
each reflecting something of the 
glory. The good deeds of this life are 
dewdrops, innumerable, lying unseen 
among men ; but when God shall 
pour the revealing light of the other 
world upon them, how it will kindle 
them, and make them sparkle ! The 
analogy would be perfect if it were 
not that dewdrops exhale, while good 
deeds are pearls that never melt, and 
never pass away. 

1518. Gifted Natures to Live Su- 
periorly. — When a man that has power 
of genius above his fellows seeks only 
to go about as high as men in general, 
it is as if an eagle should take pattern 
from sparrows and doves. God gave 
the eagles wings that they might fan 
the greatest heights, and spread them- 
selves nearer the sun than any other 
bird. For the eagle to play sparrow 
or dove is mean enough. And for 
men that are capable of large thought, 
of noble enthusiasm, and of soaring 
high in the realm of imagination, to 
reduce themselves to the average con- 
dition of those by whom they are sur- 
rounded, is pitiable. 

151 9. Nature Overpowering Grace. 
— I have, on my little farm, a tree that 
bore poor apples, but that has now 
been grafted with a choice sweet va- 
riety. A friend put in the grafts for 



me, and I forgot all about them. It 
was done last year ; and when I went 
back this year and saw a rousing top 
to the tree, and recollected that it had 
been grafted, I went to examine it, 
and found that almost all the grafts 
had "taken," but that the old tree 
had been there too, and overgrown 
them, and that they were lying hid 
in the branches, so that I would 
have defied any man to see them at a 
distance of ten feet off". And I said, 
' ' O my professor of religion ! you are 
just like hundreds that I have in my 
church. They all have grafts in them ; 
but the natural tree has overgrown the 
grafts, so that you cannot find them." 

1520. The Habit of Doing Good. — 
"As we have opportunity ' ' is not 
simply the antithesis of ofllicial doing 
good, or doing good at stated seasons. 
It indicates that we are to make doing 
good the very atmosphere and busi- 
ness of our whole religious life. Many 
furrows are opened in which men may 
sow seed once in their lifetime, which 
seed, if it be sown, shall spring up and 
be most beautiful in blossom and 
fruit ; but if they neglect to put seed in 
those open furrows, the opportunity 
will not come again. Other furrows 
will open, and they will have certain 
chances for doing good ; but that 
chance never again. And so there 
must be an alertness and enterprise 
and watchfulness, and above all a 
fullness of benevolent disposition, that 
shall always be pressing to find oppor- 
tunities, and to develop itself. 

1521. Goodness to be Made Appar- 
ent. — I can take a bunch of mignon- 
ette and carry it through the house, 
and have every one following after 
me and saying, " Where are those 
flowers?" They have seen none; 
they have not heard my footsteps ; but 
the fragrance is in the air. And are 
you, that are the blossoms of God's 



326 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



seeds in this life, fragrant of goodness, 
so that when you go among your 
children, among your dependents or 
among your fellow-men, your coming 
is like the passage of flowers ? 

1522. Christianity for all of Life. — 
Some Christians are like freight- 
engines at night. They carry a power- 
ful lamp in front, which casts a light 
far ahead, but in no other direction, 
leaving the everlasting snake-train 
which they drag behind them envel- 
oped in darkness. This light corre- 
sponds to the Christian's hope, which 
casts its rays heavenward, but leaves 
the long train of bodily appetites and 
necessities which go with him through 
life unilluminated. Men regard their 
worldly business and their family 
duties as distinct from their religion ; 
whereas, I understand that no man is 
living a Christian life who is not a 
Christian in the world, in the family, 
in the church, in his mind, in his soul, 
in the emotions and appetites of his 
nature, in his hand, in his foot, in his 
head, — who is not a man of light 
everywhere, and in everything in him. 

1523. God's Jewel-Case. — Is there 
anything more beautiful in a lower 
sphere than the dressing of a bride for 
her wedding? The tender hands of 
kind nurse, of loving sisters, and fond 
mother, — how they all wait upon her ! 
How the hours are consecrated to her 
glory ! How her hair is parted and 
braided with sweet simplicity ! How 
the veil is thrown over her with ex- 
quisite grace ! What jewels contribute 
to decorate her person ! 

Now, God has opened the jewel-box 
with the contents of which he dresses 
his bride, the Church : — " Blessed are 
the poor in spirit." " Blessed are 
they that mourn." " Blessed are the 
meek ; " " they which do hunger and 
thirst after righteousness;" "the 
merciful ; " " the pure in heart ; " 



"the peacemakers;" "they which 
are persecuted for righteousness' 
sake." " Blessed are ye when men 
shall revile you, and persecute you, 
and shall say all manner of evil 
against you falsely, for my sake." 
Who wants to wear jewels? There 
they are. Put them on ! 

1524. Summer in the Soul. — There 
can be no barrenness in full summer. 
The very sand will yield something. 
Rocks will have mosses, and every 
rift will have its wind-flower, and 
every crevice a leaf ; while from the 
fertile soil will be reared a gorgeous 
troop of growths, that will carry their 
life in ten thousand forms, but all with 
praise to God. And so it is when the 
soul knows its summer. Love re- 
deems its weakness, clothes its barren- 
ness, enriches its poverty, and makes 
its very desert to bud and blossom as 
the rose. 

1525. Religion: Harmony of Soul. 
—Many men carry their religion as a 
church carries its bell — high up in a 
belfry, to ring out on sacred days, to 
strike for funerals, or to chime for 
weddings. All the rest of the time it 
hangs high above reach — voiceless, 
silent, dead. Yet religion is not the 
specializing of any one feeling, but the 
mood and harmony of all of them. 

1526. Emergency-Religion. — Men 
use religion just as they use buoys and 
life-preservers ; they do not intend to 
navigate the vessel with them, but 
they keep just enough of them on 
hand to float into a safe harbor when 
the storm comes up and the vessel is 
shipwrecked ; and it is only then that 
they intend to use them. I tell you, 
you will find air-holes in all such life- 
preservers as that. 

1527. Professional Piety. — We all 
know what is meant by a professional 
air. The actor, the physician, the 
merchant, the sailor, the schoolmis- 



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327 



tress, the minister of the Gospel, — any 
of them can be told almost as far as 
they can be seen. You certainly can 
tell them if you talk with them. As 
men that work in the midst of odors 
carry about in their raiment, if not in 
their very persons, the savor of the 
things in which they work, so there 
seems to be a perfume of the business 
a man follows that strikes into him. 
. . . Now just such a stamp is apt to 
be put upon our piety. It is a certain 
smooth -speaking ; a pious way of talk- 
ing ; a restricted, narrowed, measured 
thing. Some seem to think that Chris- 
tian character requires suppression : 
not so much opening out as shutting 
in ; not so much the carrying of a lion- 
hke front that drives evil away, as the 
carrying of one's self in such a way 
that no lion can see him, and nothing 
can get at him. Thank God, profes- 
sional piety is not as common as it 
was. We are in a transition state out 
of it. Yet there are many things that 
tend to produce a want of robust, 
open-faced, upright, manly piety. 

1528. " Quit Ye Like Men ! "— It is 
not a man's part merely to keep his 
armor bright ; to hang around the 
edge of the fight, and, whenever he 
sees it bulging out towards him, to re- 
treat to a hill, and, if any dust has 
fallen upon his armor, to set to work 
to brush it off. It is a man's business 
to go down to the battle, and to use 
his sword when he gets there. Man 
was not meant to be an armor-keeper; 
but there are men who go all their 
lives scrubbing up their armor — keep- 
ing their hope bright and their faith 
bright, but never using them. 

1529. Religious Depth. — When a 
heavily freighted ship gets aground, 
there is no use of attempting to move 
it with jacks and screws and poles. 
There is no help for it until, by and 
by, God's sun and moon, wheeUng, 



bring in great tides and sea, and the 
multitudes of the waters lift up the 
vessel by more depth, so that it swings 
out and is free from obstruction. Now, 
half our troubles we have because, 
being loaded heavily, we run deep, 
and get aground in the shallow waters 
of this world. And when we go to 
God for rehef, he opens the doors of 
thought and feeling ; he discloses the 
fact of immortality and glory ; he 
makes known the reality of the com- 
ing world ; he reveals his truth through 
the Lord Jesus Christ, and by deepen- 
ing our religious experiences he gives 
the soul such an uplift that he carries 
us over and beyond our troubles. 

1530. Fruitful Lives. — If you shake 
the tree, you can bring down fruit, no 
doubt ; but I remember, when a boy, 
the persuasion to get early out of bed 
was the thought of the large white 
apples that lay beneath the trees, 
awaiting the first comer — that had 
dropped upon the grass in the silent 
night, almost without a breath of wind 
to stir the branches. Now I think 
every man ought to carry his boughs 
so full of fruits, that, like the apples 
which drop from silent dew, they will 
fall by the weight of their own ripe- 
ness for whoever needs to be refreshed. 

1531. Self-Effect of Holy Living. — 
Such is the power of inward beauty 
that after a time it strikes through, 
and, though I may be ungainly and 
distorted, nevertheless the soul is 
mightier than the framework of the 
features, and whoever t's good, by 
and by /ooks good, and whoever is 
deep-souled gives that expression to 
the countenance itself. Mild qualities 
penetrate, and at last find physical 
clearness. There is no cosmetic that 
is half so good as grace. 

1532. Useless Religion, — A religion 
that does not take hold of the life that 
now is. is like a cloud that does not 



328 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



r.iin. A cloud may roll in gramleur, 
and be an object of admiration ; but 
if it does not rain, it is of little account 
so far as utility is concerned. And a 
religion that consists in the observance 
of magnificent ceremonies, but that 
does not touch the duties of daily life, 
is a religion of show and of sham. 

1533. The Soul that Finds God. — 
Before the sun has risen the air is full 
of flitting bats and owls, and the night 
is given up to the cockroaches and the 
crickets, and the wild beasts of the 
forest are abroad and they are filhng 
the gloomy recesses with their roaring. 
But when the morning sun comes out 
and dissipates the vapors and mists of 
the night the beast slinks into his lair, 
away go the bats and the noisome in- 
sects, away go the songless owls and 
seek their hiding-places, and out come 
all the sweet-singing birds, and the 
whole air is full of light and rejoicing. 
So, I think that when the sun of right- 
eousness arises with heahng in its 
beams all these doubts, and fears, and 
temptations, and hateful passions will 
slink into their hiding-places and dis- 
appear, and the glory of God will rise 
upon the soul as the glory of the sun 
rises upon the dew-spangled morn- 
ing. 

1534- Fruitfulness. — I remember 
hearing a noble old man of the wilder- 
ness say, " If I have one tree, and it 
bears a bushel of apples, it is a great 
deal better that by generous culture 
and pruning I should make that tree 
bear ten bushels, than that I should 
have ten trees each bearing one 
bushel." We want Christ to reign in 
more and more hearts ; but we want 
those hearts in which he is reigning to 
become fruitful in holiness, so that at 
last we shall stand before the world 
abounding in the fruits of the Spirit. 

1535. Give God the Best. — God will 
not thank you for the parings, the 



peelings, the chaff, the shucks, of 
your time. If there is an hour when 
your thoughts are clearer and your 
affections sweeter than at any other 
time, take that hour for God. 

1536. Theory and Practice. — Ideas 
are not Gospel : dispositions are Gos- 
pel. . . . You may bring me a cata- 
logue of fruit ; all the fruits of the 
earth do not taste good out of a cata- 
logue. Bring me one cluster from the 
vines, — that touches at once my palate 
and my imagination. 

1537. Man's Serenity in God. — As a 
scared child running from some alarm- 
ing danger into the house seeks the 
mother's lap, and is wrapped in her 
arms and falls asleep in the conscious- 
ness " Mother will care for me," so it 
is in the soul's power that is wrapped 
in the conscious bosom of its God to 
not care what men say and do unto 
him ; so it sets us free from all the en- 
vironments of human life. 

1538. Conscious Sonship. — There 
have been times when European con- 
vulsions have pitched kings and 
princes headlong out of their thrones 
and castles, and sent them wandering 
all over the world. It is said that the 
educated nobles of France bore the 
emigration more patiently than any of 
the common people. I, myself, was a 
witness of that fact in the Hungarians 
when they came to this country with 
that noble hero, Kossuth. The men 
that could bear the loss of place, 
power, country, everything — the men 
that bore that best were the most 
highly educated. They were nobles. 
A man may be reduced to physical 
extremities and have every measure 
of weakness upon him, yet if he has 
planted in him this consciousness : 
" I am a son of God ; I am a noble ; 
I am a prince" — that man is larger 
than the whole air, larger than the 
whole world. 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



329 



XX VI I. SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



1539. Conversions are like the dawn 
of morning : they come and irradiate 
the very dewdrops and change them 
to jewels ; they wake all the birds, 
they wake all hearts and melodies. 
. . . No man is illumined entirely at 
conversion ; it is the rising light, that 
shines brighter and brighter unto the 
perfect day. 

1540. Regeneration. — The process 
of being born again is like that which 
a portrait goes through under the hand 
of the artist. When a man is con- 
verted, he is but the outline sketch of 
a character which he is to fill up. 

1541. Perseverance in Self-Cleans- 
ing. — Right in my bedroom I found a 
place where the rats came out for their 
dances and carols at night, and I 
speedily plugged the hole ; but did the 
plugging of the hole rid me of the rats? 
They simply gnawed a hole somewhere 
else ; and they abide with me still. 

Do you suppose that when you have 
stopped up one hole, you have cleared 
up all your interior troubles. 

1542. The Resurrection of a Soul. 
— Where a man has for thirty or forty 
years been accustomed to judge of 
what was right or wrong, of what was 
best or not best, by its relation to his 
own personal interest ; when he comes 
to judge of these things by what is 
just, and right, and true, though there 
are hours in which he is raised from a 
lower to a higher life, yet his resur- 
rection does not imply that he will be 
free at once from all vulgarities. 
There are many napkins of the grave 
to be removed ; there is much smell 
of the soil to be cleansed from him. 
It takes time to make character. Al- 
though the beginnings of character 
which consist in voluntary change 
may be instantaneous, the full and 
final results require gradual growth. 



1543- Conceit in Moralities. — How 
would I attempt to convict a person 
of ignorance ? If a little sprig of a 
fellow comes where I am, thinking 
that he knows everything, the best 
way to deal with him is to assume 
that he really does know. I intro- 
duce one subject, and assume that he 
is familiar with it, and question him 
upon it till he begins to swallow, and 
to say to himself, " I do not know 
quite as much as I thought I did." I 
at once pass from that to another sub- 
ject, and assume that he knows 
something on that, and pusli him 
along till he begins to boggle, and 
feel that he is not half so wise as he 
thought he was. And by the time I 
have swamped him on half a dozeii 
subjects, he will be quite crestfallen, 
and have some idea of his ignorance. 

And, if a man comes to me and 
says, " I cannot see that I am a 
sinner," I say, "Then you do not 
need any change nor repentance. But 
if you cannot see that you are a sinner, 
you ought to act like a Christian. 

1544. Conviction without Choice. 
— What would you think of a man 
who should go to his business as men 
go to church from Sabbath to Sab- 
bath? A man sits down in his office, 
and it seems to him that it would be a 
good thing if he should go into a cer- 
tain operation. He thinks it all over, 
sees how it might be done, and is 
satisfied with it. Then he begins and 
goes all over it again. He thinks 
about it all day. He goes home, and 
sleeps on it ; and when he gets up the 
next morning he is convinced that it 
would be a good thing. But he never 
does decide to go into it. By and by 
another man goes into it, and comes 
out all right ; and this man says, 
" Well, I might have made a very 



330 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



handsome sum if I had gone into 
that ; I was on the point of doing it, 
but for some reason I didn't." 

Such, have their parallel in those 
who go to the house of God, and 
listen to clear instruction, and have 
the way in which they should go 
pointed out definitely to them, but 
who, although they have much right 
feeling, although they are entirely 
satisfied in their judgment as to what 
they ought to do and to be, or ought 
to begin to do or to be, fool with it 
(that is the plain English), They turn 
it over in their minds ; but it never re- 
sults in choice. 

1545. Decision for the Better Life. 
— Do not let such an appeal as I am 
making to you now go away as a 
merely curious and pleasing reverie to 
be forgotten to-morrow. Let not the 
footsteps of your meditation be washed 
out by the recurring tide of the sea to- 
morrow. Begin now with the consent 
of your understanding, with the sanc- 
tion of conscience, with the solicita- 
tion of hope, and with the benediction 
of love, by the power and the draw- 
ing of the divine Spirit, which is as 
universal and vivific as the sun. 

1546. Christ Unconfessed. — There 
are many who wish to live Christianly, 
but who do not wish to be held re- 
sponsible according to the Christian 
standard. There have been princes 
who, for reasons of State, did not dare 
to openly follow their real affection, 
but secretly married themselves to the 
women whom their hearts loved. 
They entered into the marriage rela- 
tion, but never avowed it. They 
wanted the comfort of heart which 
came from that relation, but they kept 
it secret, because they did not want 
to stand before the State and be con- 
demned as having formed a mesalli- 
ance. There are many who want to 
have a secret alliance with the Lord 



Jesus Christ ; who want to have all the 
sympathy and succoring benedictions 
which come from faith in him ; but 
who do not want to avow it openly. 

1547. Christ to be Confessed. — Do 
you suppose that is the wedding, 
when the young man and his blushing 
bride stand up and exchange vows? 
The wedding took place when their 
two hearts rushed together as one, 
and when they clasped each other, 
and said, " Thine for life ; mine for 
life." Their souls are married first; 
but they are obliged then to stand up 
before law and institution and custom, 
and openly say, " This is what we 
have done." This declarative and 
open wedding is necessary for moral- 
ity, for decency, for reasons right and 
proper. And every soul ought to be 
married to Christ. Every soul should 
clasp him with secret faith. And 
then there should be the standing up 
and bearing outward, public testimony, 

1548. Impulses towards Christian 
Life. — How many there are in this 
congregation that I know to be wait- 
ing ! Waiting for what .'' Your very 
waiting is itself the first step of divine 
life. If a man is thinking about being 
a Christian, his very thoughts are 
God's call to him. Do not under- 
value such thoughts and impulses. 
Use them. Spread your sails. Take 
little winds when they come, and be 
thankful for them. When ships are 
off port, or seeking entrance, or be- 
ginning a voyage, I notice that the 
less wind there is the more the sails 
are spread. When there is scarcely 
any wind, the sails are all run up, and 
then there is presented one of the 
sublimest of sights — a ship, full- 
spread, wooing every particle of 
breeze to waft it on its way. 

1549. Simplicity of Salvation. — A 
lifeboat puts out to a foundering ship. 
Is it needful before one leaps from the 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



33 » 



sinking vessel into the frail lifeboat, 
that every single thing about it shall 
be explained to him, as to who made 
it, and of what materials it is con- 
structed ? No : it is only in matters 
of religion that men act so strangely. 
In all the great welfares of life, men 
do not undertake to teach the philoso- 
phy of things before the benefit of 
those things can be availed of; and 
they ought not to do it in matters so 
inportant and vital as the question of 
their soul's salvation. That which is 
essential is reciprocal love between 
God and the human soul. 

1550. Tentative Religion. — As for 
those who have not begun a religious 
life, oftentimes they make essays, ten- 
tative endeavors ; and they may be 
said to have approached it. Men 
have sometimes, as it were, tried on 
religion. And then, if you talk with 
them, they say, " I know about re- 
ligion now. I have tried it. Why, I 
have been religious for a week to- 
gether. I tell you it may be neces- 
sary, by and by ; but it is a hard road." 

What would you think of a man, 
city-bred, lily-fingered, soft-jointed, 
and soft-muscled, who should say, 
"They tell me that there is great 
pleasure in living in the saddle ; but I 
believe it is a lie, for I tried it one 
morning. I got a hard-trotting horse, 
and rode several hours ; and I was 
sore for days afterwards. I do not 
believe a word of what they say of 
horseback riding." 

1 551, Life Aroused by Revivals. — 
Is not the arousing influence of the 
revival system an educating one ? Is 
there any education that proceeds so 
fast as that which takes place under a 
warm and newly-developed moral feel- 
ing? Men in the ordinary stage are like 
robins' eggs in the nest ; you cannot 
feed them. Let the robin sit on them 
a little while, and by and by there will 



be nothing but four mouths, and as 
fast as you put in worms they will 
gulp them. To educate men in the 
cold and natural state is just like feed- 
i'lg ^S&s. Warm them, and give 
them life, and they will eat. 

1552. When God is Near. — The 
children are all playing, and the 
mother is happy ; and as long as they 
are doing well, and running in now 
and then, in their frolic, and throwing 
their arms about her neck and kissing 
her, and saying, " Dear mother," 
certainly they are very near to her ; 
but after all, it is when the child is 
hurt, and comes in crying, and the 
mother takes it up and soothes it, and 
kisses its pain away, that she is near 
to it as she is not at any other time. 

1553. The Higher Excitements. — 
Many men confound moral excite- 
ments with those of their passions, 
and think it not prudent to act upon 
their feeUngs, till excitement has 
cooled. The excitement of passion 
should cool ; but, of the nobler pow- 
ers, never. I should as soon think of 
saying to the workmen in a foundry, 
" Why do you pour that liquid, scintil- 
lating iron into the mould? Why do 
you not wait till it is cold before you 
do it?" as of asking a man why he 
heeded his convictions, and his judg- 
ments of moral truths, when his intel- 
lect was roused and his heart on fire. 
If he waits till he has cooled down, 
they will be as dross and cinders com- 
pared to what they would have been 
when his heart throbbed and was ahve 
with blessed excitement. 

1554. Instant Action on Noble Im- 
pulses. — The impulses which men 
have from their lower nature, ought 
always to be reviewed by sober sec- 
ond thought ; but the inspirations 
which men have from their nobler 
natures ought not to be made subjects 
of reflection before action. 



332 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



In the glow of enthusiasm, when 
some great want is made known, 
when the crying necessity of some 
distressed community is disclosed, an 
old rich man's heart is melted ; and 
if he could only pay down the money 
at once he would give largely. He 
means to give five thousand dollars ; 
but before the meeting is over, think- 
ing of it, he says, " I will give twenty- 
five hundred dollars." He goes home 
and thinks of it, and before he sleeps 
he says, " I will give a thousand dol- 
lars." The next morning, before the 
collector comes round, he says, " Five 
hundred dollars is a good deal of 
money to give away." And by the 
time the collector comes, at ten or 
eleven o'clock, the man purposes 
that, if he finds himself all right on 
going to his store, he will give the 
agent a check for a hundred dollars. 
The collector follows him over there, 
and, at last, after a good deal of 
haggling, he gives twenty-five ! 

1555. This World and the Other. — 
You have probably noticed that when 
men walk across a stream on stilts, if 
they look at their feet to see where 
they step, their head begins to swim, 
and very soon they have to swim or 
drown ; whereas, if they fix their eye 
upon a single object on the opposite 
bank, and never look at their feet at 
all, they reach the other side in safety. 
Now, if a man stands looking at this 
world, he gets dizzy and intoxicated, 
and falls ; whereas, if he fixes his eye 
upon the bank of the eternal world, 
he walks straighter in this world, and 
is more sure of reaching the other 
side in safety. 

1556. How to Find Christ.— Al- 
though the letter has its uses, and 
although it is blessed by the Spirit of 
God to bring men to Christ, in its own 
way ; yet the ordinary way in which 
men seek to learn Christ lay reading 



the Bible, as it were putting themselves 
into the Bible, and setting themselves 
over the fire of devotion, so to speak, 
and simmering, with the hope that at 
last they will be penetrated with such 
a flavor of Christ that they will have 
a perfect knowledge of him— this me- 
chanical notion, this notion of the 
cmsitie, as I might almost call it, is 
false and misleading. 

Christ not merely says, "Come 
unto me," but he tells you how to 
come — " Take my yoke upon you, and 
learn of me." You are to find Christ 
in practical emergencies. You are to 
find Christ in a course of action. 

^557- Almost a Christian. — I have 
seen, in summer, when June has been 
chilly and rainy, dark bushes full of 
buds that could not blossom. They 
remained buds, and buds, and buds, 
opening a little, green mostly, show- 
ing stripes of pink here and there, as 
if the labor-pain were approaching, 
and realization were about to be given, 
when the cahx should turn back to let 
out the petal ; but there came some 
glorious mid-June day, when the 
milder winds came from the South, 
and gentle warm rains fell, and the 
sun broke out in warmth and efful- 
gence ; and on that very day they 
were delivered into the full ripeness of 
beauty, in an hour. While they were 
buds they were full of expectation ; 
when they were blossoms they were 
full of beauty ; and there are multi- 
tudes of men — I know them in the 
congregation — that are in the Christian 
bud ; and if there could be some sud- 
den warmth, some inspiration of the 
Holy Ghost, some sympathy with deep 
and true Christian dispositions round 
about them, there is no reason in the 
world why they should not blossom in 
an hour. The work has been gradual. 

1558. Religious Inquirers Need 
Sympathy. — When a man's soul is in 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



333 



a perilous condition, there is every 
reason why he should seek to interest 
some one in his behalf. When one 
shuts up his religious thoughts and 
feelings inside, he is like a man who 
builds a fire and shuts both the vent 
and the flue. A fire cannot burn with- 
out air. But people when they try to 
build a fire in their souls, put in the 
material and shut it up as tight as they 
can, so that nobody would suspect it. 
That is not the way. Commit your- 
selves ! 

1559. The Time for Help. — Here is 
a man that has been gambling. In 
some affliction he goes to this or that 
church, that perhaps is a godsend 
church to him ; and he says, " Would 
to God that I could Hve a better life ! " 
Men, seeing him there, say, " I won- 
der what he is here for ; " as if a 
gambler had not a soul, and had no 
business in a church ! He weeps ; 
and they say, " As sure as I hve, I 
saw the fellow cry ! " And it is whis- 
pered about that he is under convic- 
tion ; and these good people say, 
"God's grace is very powerful, and 
even this man may be saved : we will 
watch him, and if he holds out let us 
receive him, and be kind to him! " 
But in the beginning, when ten thou- 
sand fiery fiends are around about 
him ; when his evil associates are 
plucking at him ; when the channels 
are yet deep in which his life has run ; 
when hundreds of malign influences 
are crying out to him, " Return ! re- 
turn ! return!" and when God's call 
comes faint to his ears so that he is in 
doubt as to whether it is God that calls 
— then is the time to run down to him, 
and, if he is not quite sincere, make 
him so by kindness and sympathy. 

1560. Not Chosen, because Not 
Choosing. — See this man Naaman, 
blessed with gold, a leper ! See this 
man, praised and pampered, a leper ! 



See this man, surrounded with all lux- 
uries, a leper! All this time there 
rolled the Jordan, gurgling and rip- 
pling and singing, with health in its 
bosom, and health for him. But here 
was the offended and raging great 
man turning his back on the Jordan 
and going home again. 

There are many persons that ask 
me, " If God is a father, and his gov- 
ernment is paternal, why does he allow 
men to be lost.'' " Streams of salva- 
tion, divine and blessed influences, are 
flowing down past every sinful man, 
as the waters of Jordan flowed down 
past this man, and the voices of God's 
ministers are speaking out to every 
man that needs cleansing, saying, 
"Go, cleanse thyself in the streams 
of grace ; " but men will not do it, 
and therefore they are not cured. 

156 1. Conversion a Change of 
Method. — Men carry their faculties 
very much as peasants and boors 
carry telescopes— shut up. A philoso- 
pher overtakes one of these, with his 
instrument, and he says, " Have you 
ever looked through that?" "Yes," 
says the man, "but everything is 
blurred." "Do you know how to 
look through it.^ " "I suppose I do : 
I have looked through it often enough 
to know how." But looking often 
does not teach a man how to look 
right ; and the philosopher takes the 
instrument and draws it out, and ad- 
justs it properly, and puts it in the 
hand of the peasant, and, behold, 
things afar off come near, and the man 
is in an ecstasy of wonder. 

The same takes place when God's 
Spirit comes to us. Our faculties are 
not adjusted, nor rightly employed. 
God's Spirit teaches us how to use 
what we already have. 

1562. Lost Souls. — " I come to 
seek and to save that which was lost," 
Christ says. You remember the par- 



334 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



able of the shepherd who says, " Re- 
joice with me. I have found the one 
that was lost : " but the whole flock 
was not lost, nor spoken of as such. 

The term "lost," then, when ap- 
plied to men, is a shepherd's term; it 
means wanderer, one that is out of the 
way. Never, not once, does it carry 
the idea of a corrupt nature in the 
theological sense of that term, still 
less, that "lost in Adam's fall" is 
taught in Scripture. Men's natures 
are right if used right. Your reason 
is good enough if you use it well 
enough. A man is lazy ; he has been 
brought up with no strength, no skill. 
The hand is good enough, it is the 
wrong use of it, or the neglect of it 
that is bad ; and if the lazy hand be 
put to skill, taught to lift, to work, the 
hand is all right as soon as you bring 
it into its right function and give it its 
right direction and education. It is 
born again, in the sense that it was 
paralyzed or perverted before ; now it 
has received life again, or has been 
brought to regularity and right use. 

1563, Discipline Unpleasant. — When 
the careless-handed child has learned 
to play the piano just to suit himself, 
and the master tells him that he must 
no longer play in that slovenly man- 
ner, that his fingers must yield to dis- 
cipline, he does not like it. Yet, that 
is the road to skill ; and, after a time, 
having been broken into it, he would 
not for the world go back. 

The beginnings of every step higher 
are with labor-throes, with birth-pains. 

1564. Reformation of the Passions. 
— No man likes to have the devil cast 
out of him. There is as much squeal- 
ing, and running down hill, and pitch- 
ing into the sea now, as there was in 
the time of our Saviour. And you 
will take notice that, when passions 
come out of men, they generally take 
the form of hogs ! It is the lower 



passions, it is the animal after all, that 
is dispossessed ; and that resists. 

1565. Manliness of Repentance. — 
The man who will not and cannot re- 
pent, is mean through to the very 
stamina and stock ; but where a man, 
having done wrong, has in him this 
rebound, this resiliency, this repenting 
power — there is the sign of manhood. 
That is the test. He is the true man, 
not who keeps from sin (though that 
is noble, all of us being liable to 
temptation, and to fall sometimes into 
heinous transgressions), but who can 
recover himself out of the snare. A 
man, by his cunning, may keep out of 
the hands of his enemy ; but the man 
who, being ambushed, one man against 
ten, can, drawing his sword, face 
them, and, though wounded and 
pressed back and overborne, at last 
defeat the whole of them, and re- 
cover his liberty — ah ! he is the hero. 

1566. Misconception of Repentance. 
— Men look upon repentance and hu- 
mihation before God very much as 
they do upon a voyage to the North 
Pole. Every single league, as they ad- 
vance towards the Arctic region, they 
leave more and more behind them 
greenness, and fruits, and warmth, 
and civilization, and find themselves 
more and more in the midst of sterility, 
barrenness, ice, and barbarism. Men 
think that to go to God is dreary and 
desolate in the extreme. It is not ! 
The sinner is the Esquimaux ! He 
lives in ice, and burrows underground, 
and is but little better than a beast! 
But if by any means he becomes fired 
with a conception of a better clime, 
and leaving his hibernating quarters, 
lie takes the ship Repentance, and 
sails towards the torrid zone, at every 
league he is surprised by the new 
forms of vegetation. He has seen 
oak-trees only about as high as his 
knee. Not long after he sets out on 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



033 



liis voyage, he is astonished to see 
them as high as his head. As he 
draws near the tropics, he is lost in 
wonder and ecstasy to see them Hfting 
themselves far above him in the air. 
And with what satisfaction does he 
compare the delightful home he has 
found with the miserable one he left. 

1567. Repented Sins to be Forgot- 
ten. — There are persons who live 
largely in re-hashing their sins and 
their sense of guilt. Why, did you not 
repent of them ? When a man has 
repented of his sins, that is enough. 
Put them out ; do not keep them like 
so many mummies in the house. 
When you have done wrong and 
found it out, and have changed to 
right, and have rectified all the ways 
in which your wrong-doing has affected 
anybody else, that is the end : you 
have no business to come back and 
.sit down on your old gravestones. 

1568. The Past and the Future. — 
You have no power in that which is 
past. Life that is lived stands ghastly 
as a gravestone. You cannot change 
it a particle. You cannot wipe out a 
deed. You cannot obliterate a fact. 
You cannot alter the proportion of a 
single element. But the future is 
mutable. It is as plastic as clay in 
the hand of the artist. With the 
future anything can be done if you 
but have the heart to do it. 

1569. A Test of Sinfulness. — If you 
want to know whether you are sinful 
or not, just take any of the character- 
istic commands of Jesus Christ ; take 
any point of example in him, any of 
his conduct, anywhere, and try it on 
yourself. A man goes into a store 
and says to his tailor, "Look here, 
how do I know what size I want ? " 
He looks at him a moment, then goes 
on with him trying on coats and finds 
that they do or do not fit the man. 
Try moral qualities in the same way. 



You have one text that leads to this 
very analogy or figure : " Put ye on 
the Lord Jesus Christ," as a garment. 
Put it on your conscience. Put on the 
Lord Jesus Christ as an element of 
love. Try on these Christian graces, 
and see whether they fit you. 

1570. Conviction of Sin. — The con- 
viction of sinfulness is more persistent 
with some than with others, and you 
shall hear all the way through their 
after life, men enumerating as a part 
of their religious victories, that over 
their great sinfulness — they preface 
and they finish up everything with it. 

Well, I would not ridicule them. 
It is a very serious thing. But as 
looked at from the standpoint of mere 
philosophy, it is false, not only, but it 
is mischievous to the last degree, and 
it is not practical. We do not allow 
men to do that with their bodies. 

I have had men come to me from 
the war and want to regale me by 
showing where they were wounded ; 
to take off the bandage and let me 
look at the sores. I was disgusted 
with them. There are a great many 
people who feel that the evidence of 
their piety needs to be shown by recit- 
ing their moral sores. 

1571. Grounds of Adoption. — I go 
to the slums of the Five Points in New 
York, and meet a boy that has a 
dreary and sad look, already turbid 
with moving passions, and offer to take 
him and adopt him. He is of Saxon 
blood. No sooner had he touched 
these shores as an immigrant than he 
was wafted into iniquity against his 
better nature. He accepts my proffer ; 
and when I say to him, " I will make 
you my own son," he holds his arms 
up to me in love and confidence. 
Though I know I shall have much 
patience to exercise with him, I adopt 
him. The next child I meet is a tough 
little fellow, keen and sharp. Spears 



33^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



and arrows stick out from him in every 
direction, bidding me defiance. When 
I make the same overture to him he 
damns me to my face and runs around 
the corner. Why do I not adopt him ? 
Because I cannot. He will not be 
adopted. Salvation depends upon 
man's willingness to be saved. 

1572. Elaborate Conversions. — Two 
children have quarreled. The mother 
insists that they shall kiss and make 
up ; and suppose, according to the 
manner of religious experience, they 
should say, " Why, mother, I haven't 
felt sorry long enough;" but is it 
necessary that they should feel sorry 
all day before they are fit to kiss? 
We should laugh at such a thing in the 
household. Now, it is a shame for a 
man to have a prolonged struggle before 
he yields to the influence of the spirit of 
God. It is better that one should be 
converted with a struggle than not to be 
converted at all ; but a reluctant con- 
version is far from creditable to a man. 

1573. Beginning of Spiritual Life. — 
The beginning of a truly religious life 
in the soul of a man, may be obscure, 
imperceptible and almost unconscious. 
When a man is building a house he 
can see it as it goes on. That is an 
outside matter. There is seam after 
seam, row after row of stone or brick. 
A man goes into his garden and 
plants, for spring, the early lettuce, or 
radish, or whatever it may be. He 
may sit up all night with spectacles 
and a lantern, but he will not see any- 
thing going on ; and yet there is some- 
thing going on which is vitally con- 
nected with the whole operation of 
vegetable development. The seed 
has not been in the ground an hour 
before it feels its outward husk swell- 
ing by imbibing moisture. It has not 
been for ten hours in the warm soil be- 
fore it begins to feel that its material 
itself is chemically affected, changed. 



Many a seed has not been twenty-four 
hours in the ground before there is an 
impulse in it at one end to thrust down 
a root, and at the other end to thrust 
up a plumule or the beginning of a 
visible stalk. But it makes no noise ; 
and all the earlier processes of germi- 
nation and development are invisible 
and silent, — for if you take it out into 
the light it will not grow. The seed 
needs warmth, moisture, and lumi- 
nous darkness — that is to say, con- 
siderable darkness, and yet a little in- 
visible light. So with the spiritual life. 

1574. The Christian Choice. — No 
man can insist more emphatically than 
I do that there is a point of transition, 
and that the real emergence of the 
feeling and consciousness into the 
kingdom of heaven is the result of 
some form or action implying will or 
choice. And all choice, however 
gradual the antecedents may have 
been, finally is instantaneous; as when, 
for instance, with a pair of scales, you 
may put ten pounds of material in the 
one, and add a pound to the other, 
and a second pound, and a third, and 
a fifth, and a seventh, and a ninth, 
and a half-pound, and a quarter, and 
then smaller fractions, clear up until 
you come to the one-hundredth part of 
an ounce, and then, at last, when you 
get the least shade or hair more than 
the weight in the other scale, instantly 
it goes down. The preparation may 
have been ever so long, but when the 
balance is struck, it passes instantly — 
certainly in so far as you can form the 
least conception of it. The mistake 
lies in ignoring these preceding stages, 
which are, every one, actually part 
and parcel of the final development. 

1575. Unconscious Preparation for 
Christianity. — Conversion is a volun- 
tary and conscious acceptance of the 
life, purposes and disposition of Christ. 
We come to it by imperceptible stages, 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



00-7 



but we may not recognize when the 
stages cease. You may have a right 
to call yourselves Christians without 
knowing it. I knew a young man, in 
Boston, whose father was rich. He 
had genius particularly in the forma- 
tive, sculptural art ; and his amuse- 
ment was in making busts and little 
clay statues. One lucky day the 
father lost all his property, and the 
young man was thrown out of leisure 
and had to work for his own liveh- 
hood. He had already made the 
busts of friends ; and he said to him- 
self, " What can I do for a living better 
than this?" Well, he has come to 
the artist state already, unconsciously, 
not expecting to be a professional art- 
ist, simply following his taste ; but the 
moment he declares it, then everybody 
says, " He has become an artist." 
He has been an artist a good while. 

1576. Realization of Change. — 
When I traveled in Italy I knew the 
line between Italy and Austria. We all 
had to go out and have our trunks ex- 
amined and our passports vised. We 
were all of us hurried out suspiciously, 
as if we were contrabands. Then we 
went over, and I knew I was in Aus- 
tria. But in America you can go 
from one State to another, as there is 
no Custom House, thank God, on the 
lines ; as there are no passports re- 
quired ; as there is nothing to interrupt 
the journey. You glide into the State 
of New York from Connecticut, from 
New York into Pennsylvania, and 
from Pennsylvania into Ohio, and you 
do not think you have made any 
change in the State, though you have 
really. And when you look into the 
matter you reahze the fact. 

You bring a person up in Christian 
nurture, and in the admonition of the 
Lord, in the household, and he is 
gaining more light ; he is adapting the 
light which he has ; and he comes 



gradually and naturally into that state 
of mind in which all he wants in order 
to reahze that he is a Christian is to 
wake up into consciousness. 

1577. Expression Increases Emo- 
tion. — When the young maiden heart 
first loves, to think, " I love," creates 
in her no small amount of agitation ; 
to speak it is to tremble ; and to wiite 
it — that is almost impossible. And as 
it is with the better and nobler feel- 
ings, so it is with all the feelings : it 
adds tremendous weight and emphasis 
to them to embody them in words. 

1578. Christian Life a Study. — 
When a man is converted he simply 
passes from unconscious selfishness to 
conscious benevolence. That is the 
process in him ; and he becomes a 
student of that. He begins it just as 
when a man goes into a profession, as 
a doctor, lawyer, minister, or anything 
else. Thenceforward his study all 
works in the direction of the generic 
purpose of his life and follows that. 

1579. Geniality in Christian Life. — 
Suppose, maiden, in the simplicity and 
purity of your hfe, with every thought 
starlight, and every affection like the 
morning-glory, blossoming at every 
axil, one should draw near to you to 
win your heart and hold it for life in 
wedded love ; and suppose you should 
say, "Ah! now that I am about to 
become that man's wife it ill becomes 
me to be gay and genial and cheerful ! 
I am to be a wife, and therefore I must 
be dull and sober." Would you say 
so? Every joy that flashes from your 
eye, every delight that breaks forth in 
your countenance, is a tribute to him. 
Nobody says any such thing when a 
man is the groom ; but when God 
would affiance our souls we foohshly 
feel (for we have been taught to feel 
so) that joy must be laid aside. 

1580. Violent Conversions. — A man 
says, "Such a person, when he was 



338 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



converted, was at first swept like a 
meteor into a gulf of despair, and then 
shot like a comet into the realm of 
hope and peace and comfort ; but I 
never had any experience like that ; 
and why should I say that I am a 
Christian?" And so men's con- 
sciences stand in their way. Yet, if 
you look at the history of the apostles 
and others who became Christ's dis- 
ciples, you shall find that for the most 
part they had no such outbreaking 
and up-breaking experiences as those 
to which I have alluded. They came 
under the influence of the Saviour, 
and into personal affiliation with him 
and with his work, in an even quiet 
way, without any exact recognition of 
the time when the change was wrought. 

158 1. Quiet Conversions. — Imagine 
one of these roaring old sailors, know- 
ing all the wickedness of the world, 
and telling of the experience he had 
when God changed his heart, and then 
hearing a mild, gentle, peaceable man 
say: "I never had any such experi- 
ence as that." Of course not; it was 
contrary to nature that he should have 
any such experience. " But did you 
not have such a sense of imperfection 
and wrong-doing, so that you aban- 
doned many things behind and aspired 
to many things before ? " " Oh, yes ! 
but then I never had any such cleans- 
ing work." Cleansing work ! Do you 
suppose that feeling is soap and sand, 
and that it scours a man out? 

1582. Not Mode, but Fact, of Con- 
version. — There are men overtaken on 
a summer day with winds that capsize 
their boat. Some fall out on one side 
and some on the other. One set get 
ashore where, happily, the water is 
shallow, so that they are only a little 
wet ; the others get out where there is 
the eel-grass, the flags, the weeds, and 
all sorts of mud, and they have to 
wrestle with the bottom of the water 



as well as with the top. They are 
spent and weary, and they get to the 
land out of breath, and down they go 
on the beach. Those that escaped 
very easily are standing and looking 
at them panting, and they say to 
them : " Did you have such a hard 
time of it? We did not; we just 
waded quietly ashore. If you escaped 
I am afraid we have not, for we had 
no such time as that," 

1583. Conversion but the Start. — 
You ask a physician, as he comes out 
of the hospital, " Do you know A. ?" 
The physician says, " I know him." 
It is a man who was near to death, and 
who was given up by his friends. 
"What is his condition?" you ask. 
" He is convalescent," says the phy- 
sician, "and I have no question that 
he will be restored to health and 
strength again." But go and look at 
the man, cadaverous, emaciated, 
weak, and full of pains — some real 
and some only imaginary. The physi- 
cian says he is going to be well ; he is 
going to be, and there are lucid inter- 
vals when he thinks so himself ; but, 
after all, there is a great way between 
the symptoms of recovery which the 
doctor sees and perfect health. 

Now, God tells us that we are to be 
perfect men in Christ ; but the early 
symptoms of spiritual health are far 
removed from the thing itself. 

1584. Hope, in Faint Beginnings. — 
The "Christian evidence" of a man 
is his life. Start in it at once and you 
have the help of all heaven. Begin — 
move ! Ah ! when a man has been 
nearly drowned and rescued from the 
water, and brought home, the wife, in 
distraction, fills the house with shrieks, 
"He is dead! he is dead!" And 
there is every sign of death on him. 
By and by the physician, applying his 
remedies, feels, and he thinks there is 
a faint deep breath ; he holds the glass 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



339 



to the mouth, and it is bedewed, and 
the word goes out, "He is ahve ! he 
is ahve ! " and the whole house roars 
as it were with hope and joy. The 
man is not walking about; he can- 
not get up or sit at table ; he cannot 
do anything ; but the slightest touch 
of evidence that he is beginning to 
live has in it the whole promise of life. 

1585. Getting Religion. — A young 
man, when he sets out to be a drafts- 
man, does not feel that he has acquired 
his profession when he goes and joins 
a class. A student, when he goes to 
the Academy, does not feel that he 
has his education. He scarcely feels 
so when he graduates. But many 
feel, when they join the church, that 
they have got religion, as the saying 
is ; whereas, they have merely got 
started, they have merely joined a 
class, as it were. 

1586. "Born Again." — Because it 
is so frequently repeated, this phrase 
does not make much impression upon 
those who hear it. Nobody seems to 
think there are earthquakes and revo- 
lutions in it ; but there are. Nobody 
seems to think it is a part of the 
"power of God and the wisdom of 
God"; but it is. Not the thunder 
that cracks and rolls through the 
mountains, not the summer storms 
that sweep across the earth, not the 
volcano and the earthquake, are for 
prodigiousness of power to be com- 
pared with this simple annunciation, 
"Ye must be born again." Must? 
take out that word, and say, with tears 
of gratitude, " We can be born 
again! " There is no other truth so 
full of hope as this. 

1587. Conversion, a Good Start. — 
A man has been traveling, supposing 
that he was going westward, right 
across the prairies. He wants to go 
to California, and thinks he is going 

' During the 



there ; but when the sun shines out, 
and he takes his direction, he finds 
that he has been going exactly east ; 
and he says, " Well, this never is go- 
ing to take me to California ; if I am 
going there, I must turn right round ; 
and I will." Now, when he turns 
round, and begins traveling west- 
ward, he is not in Cahfornia. But 
without that resolution he never would 
get there, and there is a sense in 
which that resolution settled the ques- 
tion of his reaching his destination ; 
and yet everybody knows that merely 
to resolve to go the other way, and to 
turn round, would not take him there, 
and that he never will get there unless 
he goes on step by step, day by day, 
week by week, month by month, till 
he reaches the end of his journey. 

1588. Conversion not Perfection. — 
The demand is that of imperial love 
to be shown to every human being, 
and carried to such a degree that you 
feel as much interest in others as in 
yourself. Can I make that a subject 
of instantaneous obedience ? Can I 
say to you, " Do it now and here, 
and get up and walk out of this church 
in the full faith that you are obeying 
this command of God"? I might 
just as well say to a man, " Make 
yourself two feet higher than you are, 
and do it instantly." 

1 589. Salvation to be Wrought Out. 
— When it is said, " Work out your 
own salvation," what is meant is. 
Complete it. A man's salvation is to 
be wrought out as an artist works out 
a picture. It is to be carried up. It is 
a good thing for a man to make a char- 
coal sketch ; but it will not do to stop 
with that. It is a good thing that refers 
to something better which iscoming on. 

1590. Escape from Soul-Bondage. 
— There are men in Richmond ^ wear- 
ing chains and manacles. There are 
Civil War. 



340 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



iiicmbeis of this chinch in prison 
there, though I know not that any of 
them wear chains. But imagine that 
to one of those that are chained, and 
that are the most carefully guarded, 
there comes, at night, after some de- 
bauch, in which his keepers have had 
recourse to whiskey, an unwatched 
hour. The man says, "I may escape 
now if I can but saw off a link of this 
chain that holds me." He applies 
himself to the work, and saws ofif the 
link, and gets rid of that which fastens 
him ; but the wristlets are on his 
hands yet. He dodges the sentinel ; 
he emerges from the prison ; he clears 
the city ; he hides himself in thickets, 
and lies half submerged in the black 
swamp, and is a thousand times more 
uncomfortable than he was in the 
prison ; he avoids the daylight, feed- 
ing on roots and leaves, and at night, 
dog-hunted and pursued, he steers by 
the north star, as many a dusky man 
before him has done ; and after days 
and weeks, wearing still those iron 
wristlets, he sees the waters of the Po- 
tomac open before him ; and he 
plunges in, and makes for yonder 
boat from which floats his country's 
flag, to tell all the world of liberty ; 
and soon he is on board. Now when 
that man saw the keeper asleep or 
drunk, and cut the chain, he was free; 
but he was not restored to his friends. 
Just so, it seems to me, men escape 
out of vices. They are chained, they 
are watched ; but there come hours 
when, if they improve them, they may 
escape ; not leaving all torment and 
trouble behind, but leaving behind 
their bondage, so that they have a 
straight path towards liberty. Some 
men carry on their ankles and wrists 
marks of early vices, to the Jordan it- 
self. What then ? Is it worth while 
for the prisoner to escape from captiv- 
ity, and get home ? 



1591. Starting Right. — When a 
nurseryman, in the winter, would 
graft for apple-trees, he takes a root 
of the desirable apple-tree, and splices 
it on for a new scion, and puts wax 
about it, and buries it in the sand, and 
lets it remain there till spring comes. 
He is very careful to get the root of 
the right tree, that the scion may be 
of the right kind. The first summer 
after it is planted it grows but very Ht- 
tle, and does not bear any fruit ; but 
isn't it a Newtown Pippin? Isn't it a 
Golden Russet? Isn't it a Rhode Is- 
land Greening ? It is. Although it 
has not been growing long enough to 
develop fruit, yet it has the right root. 

1592. True Conversion. — No man 
can jump from the alphabet into the 
uttermost parts of Uterature. There 
is no conversion that takes men out 
of the mud and slough of pride and 
selfishness, and translates them 
quicker than the twinkling of an eye 
into the clear ether of holy and ex- 
alted principles. Conversion is the 
acceptance of this aim and ideal of 
life — self-sacrifice ; a life whose whole 
power is consecrated, not to the pur- 
poses of one's self, but to sympathy 
with God, seeking the welfare of others. 

1593. Character to be Perfected. — 
A young man working in a shop, finds 
himself, little by little, drawn in other 
lines and directions ; and at last the 
impulse of art is so strong in him that 
he begins, in his leisure hours, to 
sketch, to draw, to paint ; and this 
impulse grows in him till, by and by, 
it occurs to him, " Why should I be a 
carpenter, a machinist, a mechanic ? 
Why should I not be an artist ? " And 
at last he makes up his mind that he 
will, and says, " I will become one." 

Now, that resolution is the turning 
point in the man's history. But does 
that resolution make him an artist? 
It does, and it does not. It is that 



SPIRITUAL BIRTH 



341 



without which he would not be an ar- 
tist ; and yet, the being one is to result 
from incessant application, from prac- 
tice, from all that grows out of such a 
resolution. 

1594. Conversion and Sanctifica- 
tion.— No man ever suddenly cleared 
up forty acres of land. A man may 
begin such a work suddenly. No man 
ever began to do a thing without mak- 
ing up his mind to do it. No man 
ever began to be a Christian without 
a volition ; and no volition was ever 
anything but a flash — an instanta- 
neous thing. But the volition is the 
beginning. The evolution of Chris- 
tian character is gradual. 

1595. "Born Again" — and Again. 
— We do not read lessons to tree- 
seeds, instructing them how to de- 
velop. We know that they will come 
to all that there is in them by the 
simple operation of opening up. But 
men come to it by very different proc- 
esses — by rebirths in every faculty, 
again and again and again. Scores 
of men have to be born again and 
again before they come to their full- 
ness. As every tree, on the death of 
winter, awakes, as it were, with a new 
resurrection in the spring, so men 
should be coming constantly to higher 
ideals of manhood, and the uses of 
occupation, the uses of society, the 
uses of the physical world, and of the 
bodies in which they are. 

1596. The First Soul- Work of Re- 
ligion. — The first step of husbandry is 
to relieve the soil of wild growths, and 
prepare it for tillage. The trees are 
felled, and then gathered together and 
burned, that the ground may be dis- 
encumbered and laid open to the sun. 
But some, for expedition, are only 
girdled. All connection between the 
sap at the roots and the top is severed 
by a line of sharp cuts around the 
trees ; and so girdled, they will stand 



and carry through the summer the 
leaves already out, but they will never 
leave again ; so that, little by little, 
more and more ground is arable. 

The first work of religion in the 
human soul is analogous to this. It 
is to cut up the grosser processes of 
life ; it is to destroy the worst forms of 
evil habits ; it is to cleanse men of 
vices, to rid them of vile associates, to 
cure them of evil dispositions ; it is to 
drive away the works of darkness. 
But there are many things that must 
yet disappear from the soul before 
God's husbandry is completed — 
things that in the beginning are only 
girdled. They hold some leaves for 
a single season ; they hold their trunk 
and branches several seasons, and 
only little by little are they toppled 
over and brought to the ground. 

1597. Beginnings of the New Life. — 
A man opens a school among the col- 
liers of England — men and women 
that have lived under ground all their 
lives, and to whose darkened minds 
the light of knowledge has never pen- 
etrated. Tidings of this school spread 
abroad, and some traveler says, " I 
understand that education is making 
great strides among those colliers, and 
I will go and see what progress they 
have made." He goes into the school 
where women and men are learning to 
read, and hears an old man with gray 
locks that hang down on his shoul- 
ders, and with a black finger with 
which he rubs dirt along the book 
before him, spell, " B — a — k — e — r, 
baker." After he has heard the old 
man spell a few such simple words 
slowly and painfully, he says, " Well, 
if that is what you call learning, if 
that is your idea of education, then I 
am done," and goes out in great dis- 
gust. A sensible man would rejoice 
to see these small beginnings of what 
promises to result in enlightenment. 



342 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



Now, men aie colliers when we 
bring them into the church. They 
have been in the grimes and mines of 
sin. They have been groveling in the 
earth, and must be patiently educated. 

1598. Kindling of the Spirit-Life. — 
As one lights a taper on the tip of the 
wick, and there is a flame just burn- 
ing, dancing, and not knowing whether 
to go downward or upward — whether 
to abide or to go out ; so men have 
kindled in them a hope which they 
dare not whisper of — the child to the 
parent, the friend to the friend, the 
husband and wife or the brother and 
sister to each other. For days and 
weeks and months, often, men carry 
kindled in their bosom a strange 
spiritlife. It must be tenderly shielded 
and nourished. 

1599. Jacob's Ladder. — Consider 
what the vision must have meant to 
him, as he turned it over in his mind. 
He had just broken off from home. 
He had that day become his own 
master. The future was all to be 
made. Before him, in this exigency, 
arose a symbol which seemed to say, 
" Whatever plan you shall henceforth 
set up, though it begins upon the 
ground, let its top reach to the heaven. 
Though your undertakings base upon 
the earth, let them stretch out and up 
until they find a resting-place and a 
consummation above. Do nothing on 
earth that may not be known and felt 
in heaven." 

1600. Joy of the New Life. — Have 
you never, after a cloud has long cast 
its dark shadow on a field, seen the 
shadow slowly move away, and leave 
the field exposed to the full light of 
the sun ? I have seen the shadow 
move off from the souls of persons in 
the same way, and leave them in the 
light of the Sun of Righteousness. 

1 60 1. Self-Deception in Christian 
Hope. — There is some danger of self- 



deception, but I would like to know, 
between earth and heaven, a spot 
which a man can be on, and a thing 
that he can pursue that there is not 
some danger of it. And if you were 
to stop and weigh and measure the dan- 
ger, human life would petrify. 

We might just as well, in that be- 
nign and blessed hour when the soul 
is certain of love and of being loved, 
tear ourselves to pieces by an analysis 
of our experiences. Let one say : 

" I do think I love her, but let me 
see, what is love ? I ought to analyze 
that matter, and I ought not to allow 
myself to be mistaken in that thing. 
Is it a going forth of my will benevo- 
lently towards her, or is it simply 
the admiration of her form and come- 
liness? What is it ? " 

The matter is that you are a fool on 
a gridiron. Now, if a man does not 
know he is in love, or whether he is 
not, it is pretty sure evidence that he 
is not. Men say : 

" Do you think your purpose is to 
serve God? " 

" Well, I hope it is." 

Hope it is ! If a man sits down at 
your table, and you say to him : 

" Do you relish that peach ? " 

" Well, I humbly hope that I do." 

I would give him red pepper, and I 
think he would know then whether he 
did or not. 

1602. Love Transforming Selfish- 
ness. — There is nothing in the consti- 
tution of man to which selfishness 
yields as it does to love. I do not 
know of anything that is more prettily 
selfish than a petted girl. She is the 
delight of father and mother ; she is 
beautiful ; she is accomplished ; she 
is universally attractive ; she is be- 
loved by all who know her ; but in a 
thousand little ways she manifests her 
selfishness, and everybody in the house 
tolerates it, while the neighbors say, 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



343 



"She is utterly spoiled." Ere long, 
in the hour of disclosure, she finds her 
mate ; she loves ; and at once all her 
faults and failings begin, one after 
another, to dissolve, and disappear, 
like snow in March. By and by love 
watches the cradle ; and this creature, 
that father had to serve, and mother 
had to serve, and the servants had to 
serve, and everybody had to serve, 
and towards whom ran every stream 
of delight, being now a mother, cares 
nothing for parties and visits— cares 
only to serve that little unrequiting 
child. All night she will give up her 
sleep that she may watch over it if it 
be sick, and all day she will devote 
herself to it. She is joyous as a 
bird as she sits and sings to her darl- 
ing in the cradle. And that which 
wrought so marvelous a change was 
Love. 



1003. Perseverance in Well-Doing. 
— There are many fruit trees that blos- 
som, and then shed their blossoms 
without setting any fruit. There are 
other trees that blossom, and set their 
fruit, and shed it almost as soon as it 
is set, because they have not sufficient 
root-power and stem-power to hold it. 
There are still other trees that have 
fruit which grows largely and prom- 
ises well ; but they are situated so that 
the winds blow it off before it is ripe. 
These represent many persons who 
have real religious convictions, but 
who are so situated that the struggle 
of life prevents their piety from pro- 
ducing its legitimate results. A good 
tree is one that blossoms, sets its fruit, 
and holds it till it ripens, and does it 
every year ; and it is the kind of men 
who are represented by such a tree 
that the Gospel wants to bring up. 



XXV III, SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



1604. The Atmosphere of Growth. 
— To-day [the first Sunday in May, 
1858, when 190 persons joined Ply- 
mouth Church] is Nature's great com- 
munion-day. Ten million times ten 
million new-born leaves are holding 
up their tender hands to greet the sun. 
What is that which evokes them all ? 
What is that in which they are all to 
live, and are to live all summer long ? 
What is that which is to ripen them 
till they all glow like gold in autumn ? 
It is the warmth and light of the sun — 
the great atmosphere in which God 
bathes all nature. Now we are to hve 
and to grow in one great atmosphere 
which is to be about us — the atmos- 
phere of Christian love. 

1605. Victory Over the Past. — Grant 
that we may so live by faith as to be 
evermore conscious of the movements 
of God around about us and within 
us, and that we may triumph over the 



physical man — over all memory of the 
past — over its sins and mistakes. May 
we not stumble at dead things which 
long ago should have been buried. 

i6o5. Activity the Condition of Vi- 
tality. — Every athlete knows, and trains 
for that purpose, that if any muscle 
lies dormant through long periods it 
shrinks and goes back. If it is to be 
impleted it must be used. So there is 
a law of usance in moral forces. 

1607. Goodness a Growth. — You 
might just as well, with a pair of bel- 
lows and a heap of coals, undertake 
to make summer about a tree, and ex- 
pect it to burst into blossom and fruit 
at once because you are in a hurry, as 
to undertake with this vast tree of hu- 
man life to force it beyond the ordi- 
nary laws of progression in excellence 
of human life. 

1608. Christians Not Made Instantly. 
— You take the wax and melt it, and 



344 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



put it on the letter or paper, and stamp 
it with the seal ; and when you take 
the seal off, there is the stamp, clear 
cut. It is there once and forever. 
But no man is made a Christian once 
and forever. There is no seal that 
stamps a man so that he bears the like- 
ness of God at once, clear, sharp and 
perfected. A man is born into his 
second manhood as he is into his fust, 
with all its findings-out before him ; 
with all its mistakes ; with all its sor- 
rows and troubles. He is to go 
through a spiritual experience which is 
not unaptly paralleled to that of his 
physical manhood. 

1609. Sowing and Reaping. — Error 
is not as good as truth, I do not care 
how sincerely you hold it. Sincerity 
does not change the great line of cause 
and effect. 

We know this to be true always in 
regard to the lower elements. Fire is 
fire, whether a man thinks it is or not. 
It is true in regard to all the parts of 
the human body— the bone, the nerve, 
the tissue, the circulation, etc. The 
Bible says that it is just the same 
higher up — that in all spiritual ele- 
ments cause and effect govern. What- 
soever a man does, he shall receive 
according to the nature of it. They 
that sow to the flesh, the apostle says, 
shall of the flesh reap corruption ; and 
he that sows to the spirit shall, by 
that same universal and inevitable 
law of cause and effect, reap life 
eternal. 

1610. Inward Conflicts. — One of 
Kaulbach's most remarkable paint- 
ings is founded on a legend, that on a 
certain anniversary spirits were in the 
habit of assembling and fighting in the 
air. However that may be, the bat- 
tles of the spirits and the battles of 
the air, in the Christian conflict, are 
much more memorable than any of 
the declared battles of sense and of 



the body. And although these spir- 
itual and airy battles seem to be with- 
out trumpet, and without record, and 
without a witness ; although there are 
no poets that chant the praise of the 
closet ; although there are no his- 
torians that chronicle the conflicts of a 
man with his own spirit, with perni- 
cious habits, with evil inclinations, 
with violent temptations ; although the 
eye of man cannot see these things, 
yet they are not unwatched. God, 
over all, takes notice of everything 
that concerns us. 

161 1. Equanimity. — It is very easy 
for us of the pulpit to declare that 
men should live so high as not to be 
disturbed ; and there is such a thing 
as living in this world so that the or- 
dinary affairs of life shall not greatly 
disturb us ; but the real and the ideal 
are wide apart. Men teach us how to 
go to sea without being seasick, and 
the remedy is absolute — as long as 
you are on land ; and men teach us 
how to go through this world main- 
taining equilibrium and tranquillity ; 
but no man can do it until he has 
learned the business of doing it ; and 
a great many never learn that. 

161 2. The Bible to be Practiced. — I 
was convicted when I went to Paris ! 
I had learned French. I could read 
newspapers in the French language 
almost as easily as in my own, and I 
thought I understood French very 
w^ell, but when I went to Paris and 
heard it talked, it seemed like jargon, 
they talked so fast, and ran the words 
into each other so ! I went into the 
shops, and undertook to talk French, 
and the shopkeepers could not under- 
stand me any better than I could 
them. I came near starving to death 
because I could not ask for what I 
wanted ! I could take up French 
books and newspapers and read what 
was in them, but I came to under- 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



345 



stand, very soon, that I did not know 
very much about French. 

Many a man reads the Bible, and 
reads it well ; but let him undertake 
to talk in the language of Zion, and 
see whether he does not stagger. 

1613. The Growth of Feeling. — 
When a tree of vigorous growth — for 
instance, the mulberry — comes up, 
you notice that it grows perhaps six 
feet the first year. The next year the 
stem grows only about two feet, but it 
throws out branches on every side ; so 
that although the tree seems to have 
grown less the second year than the 
first, it has really grown more. The 
next year the growth of the stem is 
still less than the second year, but 
each branch throws out other 
branches, and the head is formed 
of a hundred twigs ; and though the 
tree seems to have grown less this 
year than either of the previous years, 
it has grown a great deal more. It 
seems to grow less in proportion as its 
life is diffused in numberless channels. 

Our feelings when they first mani- 
fest themselves, seem very emphatic ; 
but when they begin to divide and 
branch out into collateral actions, they 
seem less, because they are hidden, 
while in reality they are more, 

1 614. Natural Law in Spiritual 
Things. — I should be very glad in- 
deed if I could take a Cremona and 
at once express my feeling by a dex- 
trous use of the bow. " No," says 
Providence, " you take up your cross, 
and break that arm in by much pa- 
tient suffering. If you do so, and 
train yourself industriously, it will 
work for harmony and melody, and 
you shall be a musician on the violin." 

Now, the self-denial that is required 
to gain skill in the use of a musical 
instrument, or to acquire any species 
of knowledge, is of the same sort as 
that which is required in taking up the 



cross as we are commanded to do in 
the Gospel : only there it is applied 
to a higher realm than that to which 
you have been accustomed to apply it. 

1 615. Higher Developments, Slow. 
— Give me a bit of wax, and see how 
soon I will take it in my hand and 
mould it into any form that I want. 
Give me a bit of alabaster, and I can- 
not work that as I can the wax, be- 
cause it is harder. Give me a bit of 
marble and that must be cut still more 
slowly. But give me a diamond, 
rough and rude, and tell me to cut 
the faces on that, by which it shall re- 
flect all the rays of light and show its 
hidden powers of beauty, and it is a 
long task. Yet when it is once cut it 
is worth all the labor that it has cost, 
and once done it lasts forever. 

Now, the lower developments that 
men gain in this world — industry and 
frugality and skill of hand — are gained 
comparatively soon, and they are in 
the lower range ; but those higher 
elements, where men really touch 
God, where their morahty begins to 
blossom, where they begin to find the 
first intimations of their own true 
manhood, and where they begin to 
know the life that is to have no death, 
and no intermediate sleep, but is to 
flame and glow in the presence of 
God — those elements come under a 
law which requires long development. 

1 61 6. Good Growth, Slow Growth. 
— Wicked men do prosper for a little 
while ; but, as sure as God lives, in the 
end they shall have their just reward. 
If you consider the whole of life from 
end to end, then truth, and honor, and 
purity, and justice, and fidelity pay. 
You can grow a mushroom or a toad- 
stool in one night, if you have a dung- 
hill large enough ; but to grow a great 
tree, that shall last for generations, 
requires vastly more time. And if 
you want men that shall last, you 



34^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



must wait till they can be built up 
solidly by good conduct ; by con- 
fidence inspired by good conduct ; in 
other words, by being tried. 

1617. Edification. — Men say, 
" Don't you know what a time I had 
when I was convicted and con- 
verted ? " What does God care for 
that ? The secret purpose of God is 
to make you men, and redeem you 
from animalism, and from the thrall 
and narrowness of pride and selfish- 
ness, to augment and enrich your na- 
ture, and edify you, — as the Scripture 
phrase is, build you up, — into resplend- 
ent, heroic manhood ; and what boots 
it, under such circumstances, that you 
simply laid a good foundation and be- 
gan to be a Christian? The question 
is, have you been built up ? 

1618. Yielding to God. ^Every day 
from my window I see the gulls over 
the bay making circuits and beating 
against the wind. Now they mount 
high above the masts of vessels and 
then suddenly drop to the water, seek- 
ing to find some eddy unobstructed by 
the steady blast ; till at length, aban- 
doning their efforts, they turn and fly 
with the wind, — and then how like a 
gleam of light do their white wings 
flash down the bay, faster than the 
eye can follow ! 

So, when we cease to resist God's 
divine influences and, turning towards 
him, our thoughts and feelings are up- 
born by the breath of his Spirit, how 
do they make such swift heavenward 
flight as no words can overtake ! 

1 619. Immature, yet Genuine. — 
Imagine a tree two hundred years old 
to look back upon the stages of 
growth through which it has passed, 
and to say, " T remember that when I 
was twenty years old I was only so 
big. I then thought I was an oak ; 
but when I compare what I am now 
with what I was then, I see that I was 



not an oak at all ! " What were you, 
then ? a vine ? a weed ? 

Do you not know that the seed-form 
and the full disclosed form are the 
same in their nature ? Do you not 
know that one is the legitimate result 
of the other? The beginnings of grace 
in the human soul may not reveal 
Christ to the extent that its latter 
stages do, but they are the same work. 

1620. Development. — When a man 
comes into a converted, disclosed re- 
ligious life, and aims at the Christian 
graces, he undergoes the process of 
development which they require. For 
instance, he begins to unfold in the 
direction of humility. No man ever 
jumped from the top of pride down to 
the bottom of humility at one jump, 
and never will. The change goes on 
by natural successive stages, one, and 
another, and another. No man ever 
came at once from a state of relative 
indifference to his fellow-men into a 
state of sensitive perception of their 
wants and necessities. He unfolds 
little by little, little by little. If a man 
has had a preliminary education, he 
unfolds much more rapidly ; but if he 
has not, then he unfolds slowly. 

1621. Patience in Obedience. — We 
know very well that when we prune a 
tree in the right manner, we prune it 
for fruit, and that we must wait a cer- 
tain length of time for the fruit to ap- 
pear ; but suppose a man should take 
his knife and cut the branch, and 
look, and say, "There is no fruit 
here, after all ? " The gardener would 
say to him, " Why, my friend, you 
must have patience, and give the fruit 
time to develop itself. Wait till next 
year, or the year after, and then you 
may begin to look for fruit." 

And so the Apostle says, " Ye have 
need of patience, that, after ye have 
done the will of God, ye might receive 
the promise." 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



347 



1622. Christian Life Requires Train- 
ing. — If there are any who think that 
Christians are made as eagles are, let 
them correct their notions. The egg 
is laid, the mother-bird broods it, and, 
when it is hatched, it is an eagle. 
Though it is only an eaglet, it needs 
not education, but simply growth : and 
it is as much an eagle the day it is 
hatched, as when it first swoops for 
its prey, or five years afterwards. It 
is no more an eagle when it is ten 
years old than when it is five years 
old, or one year old. It is born into 
eagleship. But no man is born into 
Christian life, a full Christian. That 
is a thing into which a man ultimately 
comes by laborious and immensely 
detailed education. 

1623. Learning to Live. — Men are 
started in this world with some two 
score of separate faculties, which they 
do not know how to use — which they 
certainly do not know how to use to- 
gether. New machinery needs to 
wear smooth. But what if the ma- 
chinery had to grow before it could 
perform its functions? What if part 
of the wheels were mere seed-forms, 
and had to grow up into their different 
proportions and relations, before they 
could work together? Nay, what if 
each wheel and spring was a voluntary 
agent, and had to consent to work, in- 
stead of being coerced by physical 
laws? This would come nearer to 
what is taking place in human souls. 

1624. Training in Righteousness. — 
When I begin to write as a boy, I say, 
"Oh, if I could only make my writ- 
ing look as well as the copy! " But 
my schoolmaster does not punish me 
because I do not. When I get 
through, only faith can discern what I 
have written — sight cannot ; yet, does 
he say, " You clumsy, blockheaded 
booby, is that the way you write with 
such a copy before you?" No; he 



says, " Good boy, Henry ; there is 
room for improvement, but keep at it : 
you are doing very well." After I 
have written a week, I carry to my 
mother in triumph a paper which can 
actually be read, and I think it is a 
wonder of chirography ; and when I 
have been with the master a year, I 
look at the copy and at my tentative 
efforts all the way up, and I smile 
with perhaps a praiseworthy conceit. 
If I had been made to feel that my 
work would be a failure unless I 
equaled the copy, I should have given 
up in despair. And do you suppose 
that a man can be taken from the 
lower forms of experience and carried 
into the glorious fruits of righteousness 
with no effort or gradual progress? 

1625. Process of Spiritual Better- 
ment. — When you are sick, and the 
doctor comes and gives you medicine, 
the first effect, oftentimes, is to make 
you sicker then you were before, and 
the doctor says to you the next morn- 
ing, " I expected that you would feel 
worse. You will feel worse yet be- 
fore you are better. The liver, the 
digestion, and the nerves, must go 
through a painful process of medica- 
tion ; but when, by and by, the sys- 
tem is cleansed, and the reaction 
comes, everything will improve little 
by little, and at last you will come 
into a healthy state." As it is with 
bodily sickness, so it is with spiritual. 

1626. Good Works. — All good 
works that have a tendency to de- 
velop you from lower to higher stages 
are valuable ; but all works that have 
a tendency to satisfy you and keep 
you stationary are accursed. Your 
works should not hinder you. They 
should be like sails — not like anchors. 

1627. Early Hindrances in Christian 
Living. — I have known persons who, 
having vowed that they would live a 
better life, and thinking that they had 



348 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



fought the battle, undertook to carry 
our their decision. And as a man 
that intends to carry out the condi- 
tions of a will has to fight every one 
of the heirs, so they had to fight their 
passions on every hand. And in de- 
spair they said, " If this is the way to 
be good, I never shall be good in the 
world — never! " Why, the first reso- 
lutions of a man in entering upon a 
Christian life, as compared with the 
spiritual standard, are not twilights 
even. And when a man attempts to 
embody in his conduct these higher 
views and intuitions, these higher 
standards, these new ideals and 
tendencies which come to him 
through the light of revelation, his 
life seems to him more distorted, more 
homely, more hateful than ever. 

1628. Self-Righteousness. — Surely, 
if the child wants to be praised as be- 
tween to-day and yesterday, let him 
bring me the hideous hieroglyphics of 
yesterday, and the less hideous ones 
of to-day, and I will say, "They are 
less homely than they were." But I 
cannot say, "They are beautiful," 
until by practice he has a smooth 
chirography, when he ceases to ask 
for praise, he is so used to writing. 

And so, in the performance of your 
moral duties, those which you think 
are signs and tokens of eminent virtue 
are evidences of your slowness and 
reluctance. It is plain that you are 
but a beginner in that very matter 
which you are apt to take to your 
bosom as a reason of complacency. 

1629. The Course of Christian Life. 
— No one should be disappointed if the 
early experiences of his Christian life 
involve many doubts and fears. A 
new life, like a new river, has to pick 
its way and find its channel. The 
waters will gather in pools, and seem 
to cease to flow. Rising over the 
brim, they will shoot through some 



rugged pass, and be swirled by a 
thousand jagged rocks ; but by and 
by, when the channel is secured, and 
side streams begin to add their stores, 
the river will neither stop nor grow 
dry. There is no power on earth that 
can hold back the river from the 
ocean, or Christian life from heaven. 

1630. Principles Follow Rules. — 
A little child is told, " No, you must 
not go there." Perhaps it is a sweet- 
meat closet, perhaps a little museum ; 
whatever it is, there are certain things 
the child must not do. When, how- 
ever, the child comes to be fourteen 
or fifteen years of age, and goes 
away from home, and begins to be 
self-respecting and enlightened in re- 
gard to conduct, and comes home 
again, we no longer say to him, " You 
shall not do this or that thing." We 
begin to say, "You must study the 
peace of the family," or, " You must 
see to it that you do nothing to inter- 
fere with health." Here is a principle 
put into his hand, and he begins to 
consider what will interfere with 
health, what will incommode others, 
and what will promote the peace of 
the family. 

It is much so with children in 
Christ ; at first, rules help them ; as 
they grow in self-control they live by 
principles. 

1 63 1. Transient Knowledge. — When 
one ascends from a lower to a higher 
story he leaves every stair below 
him after it has helped him up. So 
in our ascent on earth, God employs 
a great many things in the material 
world, a great many things in govern- 
ments and in social relationships by 
which to help men above them. But 
if men will sit down on a pair of stairs 
they will never see the crystal chamber 
or dome. And that is our perpetual 
tendency — to call our knowledge 
foreknowledge, permanent knowledge, 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



349 



perfect knowledge, and to sit dow7t on 
it. Paul says that almost the whole 
scope of that which men call admi- 
rable, knowledgeable, philosophical, 
and theological, is merely relative — 
changing growth — bark, bark, that 
every other year ought to be thrown 
off for the new bark formed under it. 

1632. " Sin Revived, and I Died." — 
Let us illustrate how it is that sin re- 
vives. You have seen a carpenter 
take a straight-edge, as it is called, to 
see whether boards are straight. He 
takes a board, and looks at it, and 
says, " I guess that is straight ; " but 
when he applies the straight-edge to 
it, he finds that it is full of bends. He 
could not see the inequalities till he 
laid the straight-edge along the board; 
but then he saw them plainly. 

Now, God's word is a straight-edge; 
and if a man lays it on his course of 
conduct, it shows him that what he 
thought was right is wrong. 

1633. Christian Training. — Putting 
on the Christian life is putting on the 
harness, then. This is not peculiar to 
religion. Religion is the grandest de- 
velopment of that principle that runs 
through human nature. How free the 
hand is of the lad that is to be a 
musician ! But when he goes to his 
master to be taught the vioUn all that 
freedom is gone ; he must hold his 
hand in a particular way ; his fingers 
get cramped ; and his arm, though it 
could be moved easily enough at bat 
and ball, yet must be drawn in a par- 
ticular way, and the muscles ache 
while he works it in and out to be- 
come a musician ; and it is not until 
weeks and months have gone by him 
that he begins to find the new method 
is easier than the old liberty was. 

1634. Divine Judgment. — Some 
Christians are growing on gravelly 
hilltops, some on side-hills, and some 
in valleys ; and those that are most 



favored grow stronger than the others. 
And it is oftentimes the case that those 
persons who feel discouraged measure 
themselves by men of better oppor- 
tunities than they enjoy, by men who 
are better situated than they are. But 
God knows where he has dropped 
seed ; he looks at the root, as well as 
at the top ; and he knows what it has 
to feed on. He is more merciful and 
more discriminating than you could 
be. He does not always pity you 
where you pity yourselves. He some- 
times condemns you where you justify 
yourselves. But, on the whole, God 
is more lenient towards you than you 
are towards yourselves. He is more 
generous, he is more just, he is kinder 
towards you than you are towards 
yourselves. And if you have not 
made such progress as you would 
have done ; then, instead of giving 
way to despondency, turn to Him that 
stands uttering this radiant promise, 
" Because I live ye shall live also." 

1635. Self-Building of the Soul. — 
This silent, invisible life within us is 
not only all the time working, and im- 
mensely fruitful, multitudinous in re- 
sults, and greater than any or all of its 
exponents ; but it is all the time, while 
it is working outwardly, working on 
itself. It is a self-building process. 

As in the dark caves of Kentucky 
the lime that is held in solution forms, 
as the stream trickles from the roof, 
stalactites, or, as the water drops to 
the ground, builds stalagmites, so the 
process of thought leaves incrustations 
on the soul within, as well as outside 
of the soul. It is perpetually building 
walls, if you liken it to architecture. 
It is working channels, if you liken it 
to a stream. It is adding stroke after 
stroke to the portrait, if you liken it 
to art. 

1636. Non-Fulfillment not Law- 
Breaking. — If I go into my garden and 



3SO 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



with a ruthless blow purposely smite 
down the flowers, here and there, and 
shake the trees, and precipitate their 
unripe fruit to the ground, and waste 
it all, that is needless and gross vio- 
lence, destructive of the principles of 
gardening and fruit-growing. But 
suppose I am competing for the prize 
in a horticultural and pomological ex- 
hibition, and I am unable by all my 
efforts to bring my flowers and fruit 
up to the standard at which I aim, am 
I to be blamed ? I do not fulfill the 
laws of horticulture and pomology ; 
but I do not break them. There is 
a great deal of difference between 
breaking a law and not fulfilling it ; 
and one is not condemned for not 
completely fulfilling it if, with the 
whole force of his being, at any period 
of time, and in his relations at that 
time, he tries to fulfill it. 

1637. Human Imperfection. — I sit 
for my portrait ten, twenty times, it 
may be. The first time the artist lays 
in his pigments. Then he gets the 
general outline of the face. The eyes 
are not open, the nose is in a cloud, 
and the mouth is but a slit. A man 
comes to me and says, " I understand 
that you have been sitting for your 
portrait." " Yes," I reply. He looks 
at what there is of the likeness, and 
says, " Is that your portrait? I do not 
think it looks much like you, though I 
understand that the man who is paint- 
ing it is a great artist." "But," I 
say, " he has not got through with it 
yet : that is only the first stage. It 
won't be as handsome as I am for six 
or seven more sittings." Everybody 
would comprehend that ! Do not 
judge of human nature in the making. 
Wait till the picture is completed. 

1638. Slow Growth of Character. — 
If you were to pick up from among the 
leaves in the woods an acorn, which 
is now just sprouting, and show it to 



an old oak-tree, saying, "Once you 
were just like that," doubtless the 
tree would haughtily swing its great 
branches, and wave all its leaves in 
scorn, and looking upon itself, disdain 
the image of its own infancy. Never- 
theless, it would not change the fact 
that its vast top, its huge trunk, and 
its strong roots, were once nothing but 
a little acorn. And though it may 
seem ludicrous to take a little sprout- 
ing acorn and say, "It is the pattern 
of an oak," it is the pattern of an oak 
nevertheless. And the same is true 
in respect to moral elements — only 
more strikingly so. 

1639. Quick Maturity, Quick Decay. 
— That which you can grow in a day 
is lettuce ; and how long will it last ? 
That which it takes a hundred years 
to grow is the oak ; and it lasts for- 
ever. Time is the best tan-bark in 
the world. It seasons things, and 
makes them tough as leather. 

1640. Real Penitence a Sure Posses- 
sion. — I remember the first time I ever 
spoke from inspiration. I had heard 
eloquent speeches and discourses of 
various kinds ; but I thought such 
things were too high for me ; till, on 
one occasion, when I was speaking 
among my boy companions, the spirit 
seized me and whirled me into an 
ecstasy of speech ; and though I could 
not get it the next time, nor the next, 
I had a consciousness that it was in 
me. I had had it once and I felt sure 
that I should have it again, and I said, 
" I know it is there, and by and by it 
will come." 

So, no one who has been broken 
down in sweet penitence before God 
can forget the experience. 

1641. Process and Product. — Who 
would suspect, from looking upon 
purple and costly silks, what the 
process is by which they are made to 
be as beautiful as they are ? Go into 



/ 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



351 



the dye-shop where that process is 
carried on. What hideous, odorous, 
stenchful places ! What unneat apart- 
ments ! What . workmen's hands! 
See the beauteous fabric taken and 
thrown into that dirty hquid ! Then 
see it put into the mordant bath, 
where the colors are set ! Who would 
suspect, from watching the work as it 
is carried on, what the issue is to be ? 
And yet, out of all that filth, shall 
come forth a fabric that shall glow 
scarcely less than the flowers them- 
selves. You cannot tell by the process 
what the product is to be. 

1642. Heart-Enthusiasm. — If men 
have only a little love, an occasional 
spark, it may be troublesome to nour- 
ish it when the world casts on it green 
fuel. A large fire waxes larger by 
that very wind which blows out a 
small flame. 

1643. It is the Lord. — As to the 
care and bruises of life, its ups and its 
downs, only once feel that the hand of 
the Lord is dealing with and fashion- 
ing you, how blessed all these things 
become ! When the sculptor stands 
before a block of marble, I can imag- 
ine that the unlucent and unintelligent 
stone might say : " I was promised to 
be made a godlike figure and put into 
a public niche to be admired, yet 
here, day by day, there is a rude, 
brutal fellow with his sharp chisel and 
heavy mallet knocking off pieces from 
me, and when he has got down so 
that even my form appears, still he is 
knocking my face and cutting me 
here and there." That is the way 
that works of art are made. If there 
are any of you that are to be statues 
in the niches of heaven, God, proba- 
bly, is chisehng you. 

1644. Substance in Character. — 
You can very easily put an edge on a 
bar of lead ; but it is good for nothing; 
and if you undertake to harden it by 



heat, it melts and runs away: but iron 
does not melt nor run away when you 
undertake to harden it in the fire ; 
and when you have brought it to an 
edge, with file and rasp, it stands and 
is good for cutting. Now, a man that 
is spoiled in hardening is not worth 
having ; but a man that has been 
through the fire and been beaten out 
on God's anvil, and brought to a cut- 
ting edge by tempering and rasping in 
this life, is good for something. 

1645. Enlargement of Christian Life. 
— When men begin their Christian 
life, it is but a spark. Soon there is 
kindled in the soul some joy, which is 
more than the blaze of a match. This 
is gradually developed into greater 
experience ; and, at length, the whole 
being begins to burn and glow with a 
heavenly fire. 

1646. "Christ in You," a Growth. 
— Is this, then, to be prayed for? No, 
it is to be lived for. Every man 
would like to pray himself into Christ, 
just as the woman would have liked 
to have the free water to save her 
from running to the well. She was 
not willing to work for what she got. 
There are a great many who would 
like a Christ if he could only be 
flashed into them ; but Christ is al- 
ways born to every one a baby, an 
alphabetical Christ. You are to 
"grow in grace and in the knowledge 
of the Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. 

1647. Early Needs Outgrown. — 
The leaves with which the bean forces 
itself above the ground are nurse- 
leaves. They are stored with blood 
until the root has grown so that it sup- 
plies the parts which lie between it 
and them with nourishment. The 
germ of the plant sucks out of these 
basilar leaves all its nourishment until 
the root is established ; and then the 
plant is nourished by the root, and 
the first leaves fall off. There are 



352 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



many things that belong especially to 
childhood ; and when we become men 
we put away childish things. The 
young Christian needs exterior aids 
that the more advanced Christian 
finds within himself. 

1648. Christ to be Learned. — Are 
you willing to learn of Christ in the 
scholar-like way — for that is the term 
that he applied. Disciple is only dis- 
cipidus — pupil. Are you willing to 
begin in the school of Christ, to learn 
that which he inspires in the soul ? 

1649. A World of Endeavor. — It is 
no more true of moral excellence than 
it is of every other, that the ideal is 
difficult to approach. No man ever 
went up the way of the violin, no man 
ever went up the way of the piano or 
the organ, no man ever went up the 
way of the orchestra, without knowing 
that at every step it was labor, labor, 
labor ; yet, who ever dissuaded any 
man from the pursuit of this beautiful 
science, because there were " few that 
should be saved * ' ? There are not a 
great many Beethovens, nor Mendels- 
sohns, nor Mozarts, nor Haydns, nor 
Handels, yet there are a great many 
men that strive to irradiate life with 
the sweetness of music. They may 
not attain to a great elevation, but 
they get far above the point they 
started at, and are students forever. 

1650. Corrigible Faults. — As a 
crooked piece of timber can be made 
straight, though its nature cannot be 
changed, so a man's faults can be 
corrected, though his natural disposi- 
tion cannot be rooted out. 

1 65 1. Christian Change of Nature. 
— How can a man change his disposi- 
tion ? It is not necessary that he 
should change much. Go and look at 
Central Park. Before the artistic 
hand of the landscape-gardener began 
to work upon its surface, there were 
vast ledges of rock in every direction, 



and other obstructions of the most 
stubborn character. When the en- 
gineer came to look over the land for 
the purpose of laying it out into a 
beautiful park, instead of trying to 
blast out the rocks, he said, " I will 
plant vines around the edges of the 
rocks and let them run up over. In 
that way 1 will make use oi \\\& rocks." 
So is it with your own nature. There 
is not a single difficulty in it which 
you cannot make use of, and which 
would not then be a power for good. 

1652. Increased Moral Sensibility. — 
I believe that in thousands of cases it 
is after men have become Christians, 
that they have the first real conviction 
of sin, for it springs from their in- 
creased moral sensibihty. They never 
found out how wicked they were until 
they had advanced some steps in the 
direction of reforming their wicked- 
ness. In our country, where the orig- 
inal soil lies undisturbed, when it is 
first ploughed it is just as full of ma- 
laria as it can possibly be. Let it 
alone, and men are tolerably healthy ; 
but stir it, and they all come down 
with chills and fevers. You under- 
take to plough up your heart, and you 
will find that there is malaria there. 

1653. Wishing and Willing. — Wish- 
ing is hardly a desire, even. It is but 
the shadow, often, which desire casts 
upon a man's soul. There is as much 
difference between wishing and doing 
as between liking and loving. Men 
like a great many folks ; they love but 
few. Willing has both hands and 
feet, and uses them. Wishing has 
neither ; or else, having them, puts 
neither of them to use. Willing brings 
the soul, in an active, energetic form, 
upon life. Wishing is that state in 
which life acts feebly upon the soul. 
One is active, and the other is passive. 
And yet, often, well-wishing passes 
among men for disposition. 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



353 



1654. Shallow Discipleship. — There 
were not only twelve willing to become 
Jesus' disciples and follow him ; but 
there were twelve thousand that would 
have followed him if he had let them, 
in those moments of inspiration, just 
such as you feel occasionally, when 
some particular view of a nobler way 
of living comes to you — evanescent 
moments of sight and outsight, upsight 
and beyond-sight. There was no 
trouble in his gaining the wish and 
good-will of the common people, but 
their acquaintance was as the early 
dew and the morning cloud. It came 
like a flash and went like a flash. 
Men went back after his instruction to 
deeds of sacrifice in the Temple : the 
priest, to pray for us and pronounce 
us clean, by reason of this, that, and 
the other remedy. So they dawdled 
on, living low, selfish, and often vul- 
gar and wicked lives, but yet feeling 
that they were safely within the pale 
of God's covenants, and that there 
was no need of very much change. 

1655. Single Virtues, and Virtuous 
Character. — There are some men who 
put the whole force of their life in at- 
tempting to be just between man and 
man. That is the whole extent of 
their ambition. Some men are scru- 
pulous about their word to the last de- 
gree of Pharisaism : but in the cultiva- 
tion of generosity, of kind feelings, of 
refinements and social amenities ; in 
building up societies for the public 
benefit ; in making laws more lovely 
as well as more protective ; in the cul- 
ture of spiritual elements by which 
God and the human soul are brought 
near together — there they do nothing. 
There are men that own a thousand 
acres of land — in their soul — and have 
but a quarter of an acre of it under 
cultivation. They make a garden 
of that, and all the rest is a wilder- 
ness. 



1656. Poverty of Man's Higher 
Nature. — Too often the lower part of 
man is like mountains where fruitful 
fields are, and the higher part is like 
Mont Blanc, where there is altitude 
and beauty, but no development. 
The lower part of a man is better 
schooled, more ingenious, more fruit- 
ful. It needs regulation, it needs re- 
straint ; but oh, what fullness, what 
amplitude, what openness there is in 
the lower part of a man ! And when 
you rise to the higher part, how thin 
the air is ! and how hard it is to 
breathe ! 

1657. Low Christian Attainment. — 
A barbarian will be half-naked, with 
no clothing except a ragged blanket 
about his loins; but if he has a string 
of beads around his neck, and some- 
thing in his ears, he is immensely 
tickled with his beauty. And you 
laugh at him. But Christians are just 
like him. They have two or three 
tinkling virtues that they put on which 
cover a part of their nakedness, and 
leave the rest uncovered. Ah ! a 
sense of beauty requires more large- 
ness, and more harmonious adjust- 
ment of all the parts of our nature. 

1658. World-Life Helps Soul-Life. — 
The husk of corn — that statehest grain 
that grows on the face of the globe — 
all through July and August is the 
provider of the food on which the ker- 
nels live ; but when the corn is ripe, 
the husk is no longer of any use. 
And outside business in life, looked at 
in connection with the final results of 
Christian character, may seem very 
poor ; it may be regarded as like chaff 
and husks ; but as in the order of na- 
ture, chaff and husks feed the grain, 
so in the order of God's moral provi- 
dence, the outside life helps the inside. 

1659. Building of the Soul. — It is 
said of Solomon's temple, that it was 
built without the sound of the hammer. 



354 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



The soul is a temple ; and God is 
silently building it, by night and by 
day. Precious thoughts are building 
it. Disinterested love is building it. 
Joy in the Holy Ghost is building it. 
All-penetrating faith is building it. 
Gentleness, and meekness, and sweet 
solicitude, and sympathy are building 
it. All virtue and all goodness are 
workmen upon that invisible temple 
which every man is. "Ye are the 
temple of God." 

1660. Christian Truth for All. — 
Christianity spreads a table longer and 
richer than any hotel in the land. 
When you sit down at the table in a 
hotel, you never eat the whole bill of 
fare, but take what you want ; and 
your neighbor only takes what he 
wants ; and both of you are well fed. 
And so it is at the table of the Lord. 
Some want high doctrine, and some 
do not want any doctrine ; some want 
moral sentiment, and some scorn it ; 
some want moralities, and some, pure 
spiritualities. But a little of every- 
thing is better than one thing alone. 
So let men feed on that which will 
nourish and develop them. 

1 661. The Regenerated Man. — He 
will live thenceforth by a different 
class of faculties. Before, he lived by 
the forces which nature developed 
through the senses. He was mainly a 
physical being. Afterwards, he will 
live through the forces developed by 
the Spirit of God, — forces whose rudi- 
ments existed before, but whose 
growth and full power demand the 
energy and fire of the Divine soul. 
Like an exotic plant in a temperate 
zone, the soul without God bears only 
leaves. For blossoms and fruit there 
must be tropical heat and light, that 
we may " bring forth fruit unto God." 

1662. Aspiration Exacting. — The 
better a man is in this world, the better 
he is compelled to be. That bold 



youth who climbed up the Natural 
Bridge, in Virginia, and carved his 
name higher than any other, found, 
when he had done so, that it was im- 
possible for him to descend, and that 
his only alternative was to go on and 
scale the height, and find safety at the 
top. Thus it is with all climbing in 
this life. There is no going down. It 
is climbing or falling. Every upward 
step makes another needful ; and so 
we must go on until we reach heaven, 
the summit of the aspirations of time. 

1663. Torpidity Prolific of Disease. 
— When a tree is " bound " and won't 
grow, we know that it is very near to 
its end ; and a tree that will not grow 
becomes a harbor of all manner of 
venomous insects that hasten its de- 
cay. Men go and look under the 
bark, and seeing them consorting here, 
there, and everywhere, say, "That is 
the reason the tree did not grow." 
No, it was the not-growing that 
brought them there. And so all sorts 
of errors and mistakes cluster under 
the bark of men that do not unfold. 

1664. The End of the Year. — I be- 
lieve this is about the time of the year 
in which men take account of stock, 
in everything except their own souls. 
In the shoe and leather business they 
know just how much has come and 
how much has gone, and where they 
are. In the book business they know 
the whole account. So in every great 
concern and establishment of various 
business. They want to know how 
they stand as it regards riches. But 
alas ! where is your bookkeeper and 
your cashier, that shall take account 
of stock so that you may know whether 
you have been gaining in knowledge 
or idling away your time ; whether 
you have gained in a stable conscience, 
or have let your conscience be like a 
weather-vane, blown about by custom 
or by the breath of men ; whether 



SPIRITUAL GROWTH 



355 



you have been brought nearer to men, 
and into more loving relations with 
tliem, or whether you have been dis- 
integrating? 

1665. Christian Self-Examination. — 
You will see men in vessels approach- 
ing the shore, or in rivers when the 
waters run low, with their sounding- 
lead, calling out to the pilot and the 
captain, " Eight fathoms, nine fath- 
oms, seven fathoms, twelve fathoms." 
They are steering by the report of the 
depth of water in which they are float- 
ing. What would be the word sent 
back to you if you were to take sound- 
ings of your soul ? How much have 
anger, envy, jealousy, wrath, been 
destroyed by the overpowering influ- 
ence of love ? How much do you 
judge of duty by the principles of 
true, spiritual love? How near are 
you consciously, day by day, to the 
ever-loving God ? 

1666. Self- Knowledge, as to Tend- 
ency. — One of these things is true of 
us morally : we are going up the 
stream, we are going down the stream, 
or we are caught fast in the stream. 
We are either sailing or anchored, or 
drifting, in regard to our whole moral 
state. How many persons take any 
pains to ascertain which of these 
things is true about themselves ? Are 
you constantly gaining advantage over 
things that formerly had advantage 
over you ? Are you getting control of 
your selfishness, your pride, your van- 
ity and your jealousy ? Are you con- 
sciously increasing in the love of things 
that are right, true, noble, divine and 
eternal? Which way is your life going? 

1667. Spiritual Culture. — Even 
when wild the rose is very beautiful ; 
it is charming in its simplicity. But 
in our gardens it has been advanced 
by education, and has doubled itself 
and varied its glory through a wide 
range. Under ordinary cultivation, 



and in an ordinary season we can pro- 
duce roses that are most lovely; but 
by and by, at some rosarian exhibi- 
tion, we behold that that which we 
saw in our gardens small yet beautiful, 
swells out to wonderful size, and has a 
fragrance that is entrancing. Then 
we get a conception of what can be 
done by skillful culture, and a concep- 
tion that is addressed, not merely to 
our imagination or fancy, but to our 
practical faculties. 

It would be a good thing for every 
church, to have a single person whose 
religious experience has been carried 
up into the cerulean atmosphere ; but 
how much better it would be if there 
were many, if they knew each other, 
and if in their thought there were such 
a concordance as should constitute 
upon earth a spiritual fellowship not 
far unlike that which exists every- 
where in heaven. 

1668. Steadfast Ideals. — Say to a 
man that just comes into a conscious 
purpose of living a Christlike life, 
"You must love your enemies." 
" Not by a good deal ! " he says ; " I 
tried it yesterday, and I could not do 
it ; everything was in revolt within 
me." So it was, and yesterday he 
could not do it. Was he therefore re- 
leased from the duty of doing it ? No. 
The pressure of the divine ideal was 
still upon him. Those words have 
never been revoked. 

1669. Widening Horizons . — An ac - 
complished musician will tell you that 
he is further from a realization of the 
art of music than when he first began 
the study of it. Nothing is so com- 
mon as for men at fifty years of age to 
say, " I have corrected my hope. I 
am no longer the enthusiast that I was 
in my youth." What is this but a sor- 
rowful confession that they did not un- 
derstand the law of manhood ? We 
begin to fulfill hfe's duties on the basis 



35^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



of facts and rules ; from these we ad- 
vance to principles ; thence we pro- 
ceed to ideals ; and with these we 
must forever go on. 

1670. Low Ideals. — If I have with 
my clumsy hand practiced drawing 
for five years and cannot reach 
Michael Angelo's lines, or Raphael's 
grace, suppose, when I look at my 
work, and compare it with the copy, I 
should propose to get rid of the dis- 
crepancy by burning Michael Angelo's 
pictures and Raphael's frescoes, and 
substituting them for the work of the 
village painting master, and should 
compare myself with him, and say, 
"Ah! now I have attained. I can 
draw as well as my master." Well, 
who is your master ? That is the 
question. You have destroyed your 
high ideal, and taken a lower one ; 
and because you can equal the latter 
you call yourself perfect. 

1 67 1, Goodness Multiplies. — A 
woman who for the first time has a 
little patch in a garden says, " Well, 
now, my dear little tea-rose, you shall 
have a chance to grow." She thinks, 
" What a time I will have with my 
tea-rose;" and she sets it out; and 
then it seems very lonesome ; and she 
looks into her neighbors' gardens and 
sees there other kinds of roses ; and 
she says, " Why can't I have such 
roses as well as they ?" So she gets 
another rose, and another, and an- 
other ; and, as nothing is so contagious 
as beauty, she does not stop until she 
has a hundred roses. Now one ele- 
ment of goodness wants another, just 
as one color wants another ; and when 
the growth of the higher nature is be- 
gun, there is a tendency towards per- 
fection ; and whichever of these ele- 
ments you start with, whether it be 
purity or peace, or gentleness, or 
mercy and good fruits, it will have 
an elective affinity for the others. 



1672. Spiritual and Natural Life. — 
You will recollect that passage in one 
of Scott's novels where the introduc- 
tion of the winnowing machine is lu- 
dicrously resisted by one of the igno- 
rant but staunch old Puritan women 
on the ground that a man had no 
right to raise wind for his own benefit, 
but was bound to depend upon the 
sovereignty of God to give him wind 
when he thought best. She thought 
the old basket winnowing fan, which 
would not operate unless God sent the 
necessary wind, was the only fan that 
could be properly used. 

This case has its correspondency 
and parallel in spiritual elements, and 
exists to-day in multitudes of men who 
suppose the fruits of the Spirit are in a 
realm that is above ordinary educa- 
tion ; but I aver that every one of the 
fruits of the Spirit is subject to normal 
education under precisely the same 
laws and conditions that all the forms 
of mental development or culture are 
subject to — art, music, civil engineer- 
ing, a knowledge of astronomy, math- 
ematical knowledge of every kind, or 
skill in commercial affairs. 

1673. Effects of Culture. — How, 
when the plow was first put into the 
ground, it bounded out, striking stones, 
and throwing itself hither and thither, 
and the holder with it ! and how, 
when a man cuts his first furrows of 
grace, he is slung about hither and 
thither, and made to be a great deal 
more nimble than he wishes to be ! 
Yet, after ten years have passed, look 
upon that same operation in the field. 
Now, as the man plows, he whistles, 
and sings, and watches the birds, and 
only now and then takes account of 
the furrow. The ox scarcely sweats. 
The turf goes over as if it loved to be 
turned, and the plow tucks it down as 
a mother tucks a coverlet round hef 
little child. 



SPIRITUAL LIFE 



357 



So it is with spiritual plowing. Some 
men, looking upon others, and seeing 
with what ease they perform their Chris- 
tian duties, say, " There must have 
been more grace given to them than 
there has been given to me ; for what it 
is almost impossible for me to do, they 
seem to do without the least trouble." 
The reason is, that their higher nature 
has had more culture than yours has had. 
If you will take the rocks out of your 
rocky field, and the stumps out of your 
stumpy field, in five or ten years you 
shall have just as good plowing as they 
have. But you have got to earn it. 

1674. Poverty of Spiritual Qualities. 
— What man needs is a perfect con- 
trol of his animal nature, of his selfish- 
ness, his pride, his secularity — the 
predominance of the spiritual over the 
carnal elements. Without that, man 
cannot be man. The great mass of 
the human family are yet but animals, 
with a little garnishing of manhood 
here and there. For the most part, 
their spiritual qualities are but as 
flowers in a buttonhole. 

1675. The Soul's Response to God. 
— When the sun rose on Memnon, the 
statue was fabled to have uttered melo- 
dious noises ; but what were the rude 
twangingsofthathuge,grotesque statue, 
compared with the soul's response 
when God rises upon it, and every 
part, like a vibrating chord, sounds 
forth to his touch, its joy and worship ! 

1676. Promise of Eternal Life. — 
What if we knew the flower-language, 



and we should hear the tender violets, 
and white-rimmed daisies, and golden 
buttercups whisper, " The sun has 
gone far down to the south, and has 
forgotten us " ? If the sun heard them 
thus giving expression to their fears, 
would he not say to them, " I am but 
for a time gone south ; I will come to 
you again, and I will find you out, and 
every one of you shall come forth ; for 
while I live ye shall live also" ? The 
seasons' pledge to all things that grow 
is not half so broad and certain as is 
the pledge of God that those who are 
his shall be led by his power unto 
eternal salvation. 

1677. This World a Preparation. 
— This world is like the tuning-room 
in an orchestra. As men come in, 
what do they hear but " thrum, 
thrum, thrum," the squeal of the 
violin, the gruff coughing of the bass 
viol, and the shriek of the flute ? Each 
of the instruments is talking by itself, 
and all are going on in a mixture that 
is disagreeable to any ear except that 
of a savage. Yet out of all that con- 
fusion and noise, out of that screwing 
and unscrewing, by and by come the 
effluent melodies of Mozart, or the 
grand march of Beethoven. This 
world is a tuning-world, not yet sym- 
phonic by a great deal. 

1678. Patience with Incompleteness. 
— I do not attempt to ripen my apples 
by throwing stones at them. Oh, that 
we could be as patient with each other 
as we are with apple trees ! 



XXIX. SPIRITUAL LIFE 



1679. spiritual Refreshment. — The 
mountains lift their crests so high that 
weary clouds, which have no rest in 
the sky, love to come to them, and, 
wrapping about their tops, distil mois- 
ture upon them. Thus mountains hold 
commerce with God's invisible ocean. 



and, like good men, draw supplies 
from the unseen. 

1680. Upper and Lower Life. — You 
shall see in plantations of trees a fas- 
tigiate Lombardy poplar, the center 
and top of which is dry and dead, 
while the lower branches are green and 



35S 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



living. It is an emblem of thousands 
of men that are ahve down near the 
ground, but dead at the top. 

1681. Automatic Virtues. — No man 
is a compositor in a printing office who 
has to think where the letters are. 
His hand thinks, and he himself is 
thinking of something else while he is 
composing his sentence out from 
among the type. Knowledge that has 
been reduced so that a man knows it 
automatically, spontaneously, that we 
call knowledge. Now, our graces are 
largely occasional practices, while our 
daily life is, to a very large extent, au- 
tomatic in selfishness and in animal- 
ism. We do not have to think when 
we have to get angry. The moment 
the offensive thing is said, flash goes 
the anger ! In all our lower range of 
life we act spontaneously. Too often 
in our higher range of life we have to 
strive before we have the initial ex- 
periences. 

1682. Present and Future. — In plan, 
include the whole ; in execution, take 
life day by day. Men do not know 
how to reconcile the oppugnant direc- 
tions that we should live for the future, 
and yet should find our life in fidelities 
to the present ; but the last is only the 
method of the first. True aiming, in 
life, is like true aiming in marksman- 
ship. We always look at the fore-sight 
of a rifle through the hind-sight. 

1683. Phases of Christian Love. — 
You will find, if you examine yourself, 
that you never carry one feeling all 
the time through the day. I do not 
think a mother, however tender she 
may be, though her child is not out of 
her sight from morning till evening, 
has the conscious feeling of love half 
the time. It is true that there is not a 
moment when she is not under the re- 
mote influence of love ; but half the 
time it is in the form of thought rather 
than of emotion. You are mending 



the child's dress ; you are thinking 
what you will do for the child ; you 
occupy your time in doing it ; and 
there are a thousand things in which 
volition and intellection are directly or 
indirectly connected with this great 
central idolatry. And in the most 
eminent Christian experiences there is 
never what might be called a steady 
emotion. Emotions, in their very na- 
ture, are occasional — are intermitting. 
Other feelings are constantly coming 
in. There is perpetual change in our 
states of mind. Now it is thought ; 
now it is remembrance ; now it is 
thankfulness ; now it is joy ; but it is 
all love. 

1684. Disproportionate Soul-Qual- 
ities. — A man's soul is a band of 
music : his passions are the sub-basses, 
and the mellow tenors are his social 
affections; but the flutes, the higher 
and more piercing sounds, the upper 
notes, are the moral sentiments and 
the reason. Some few men are like a 
band that gives up everything to the 
piccolo, while all the other instruments 
are silent. Other men are like a drum 
that waxes loud and boisterous, so 
that nothing else can play. Sometimes 
one singer in a choir dominates over 
all the others ; but it is the harmony of 
all that makes the grand oratorio, the 
great choral representation. 

1685. Devotional Impulses. — There 
are three sources of devotional life. 
There are those who are automatically 
devout. As some are born so that 
reason supplies them with thought and 
intellectual stimulants ; as some are 
born with natural imaginative powers ; 
as some are born naturally mirthful, 
so others are born to be devotional. 
Still others maintain their religious life 
by the force of habit. Their impulses 
have become fixed, and habit has as- 
serted its law in them. Yet others 
depend upon mere outward occasions 



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359 



of excitement for their devout feelings. 
They are susceptible of being en- 
kindled to devotion. If they experi- 
ence it, it is brought to them. Their 
hearts are an altar, and some priest 
must daily renew its fires, or it will 
burn cold and dark. These last com- 
prise the great majority of men. 

1686. Interior Obligation Superior 
to Law. — Have we come to such a 
miserable condition that we cannot 
understand that a thing may be ob- 
ligatory upon us, though it is not a 
matter of fixed law? Is there any- 
thing known in the statute of the land 
which requires, when I meet a lady, 
that I shall take off my hat ? And yet, 
would I meet a lady, if I were in my 
senses, without paying some respect to 
her ? And is there any law that could 
make me do it as quick as I would do 
it without a law ? Laws for those that 
need laws ; but the moment that a 
man is so quick and sensitive that he 
follows spiritual necessity and influence 
promptly and truly, that moment he 
can do without the law what other peo- 
ple have to do by the law. You are 
called to liberty ; but it is a liberty to 
go higher and not lower. 

1687. The Mother of all Graces. — 
You must not only chain thoughts of 
hatred and put them down into the 
dungeon, but you must call up a choir 
of sweet singers in their places. Every 
time your enemy fires a curse, you 
must fire a blessing ; and so you are 
to bombard with this kind of artillery. 
The mother-grace of all the graces is 
Christian good-will. 

1688. Expression Gives Develop- 
ment. — Where a man turns from evil, 
and takes hold on good, there is to be 
more than meditation or wishing or 
willing ; there is to be expression. 
Even thinking cannot be clear until it 
has had expression. We must write, 
or speak, or act our thoughts, or they 



will remain in a kind of half torpid 
form. Our kinder feelings must have 
some expression, or they will roll out 
of the mind as clouds roll out of a 
hemisphere. Our kinder feelings must 
rain, or else they will never bring up 
fruit or flower. So it is with all the in- 
ward feelings ; expression gives them 
full development. Thought is blos- 
som ; action is fruit right behind it. 

i68g. Difficulty of Living. — There 
is many a man who could play a tune 
on the organ with one finger, picking 
it out, as it were, who is not able to 
take a very complicated harmony, re- 
quiring both hands and both feet, and 
carry all the parts on successfully to 
the end ; and life is so vast and com- 
plex that though a man is competent 
to any individual part of it, yet if he 
has to take the whole of it to-day, to- 
morrow, in sickness, in health, when 
pressed by business, when beset by 
temptations, when under the influence 
of excitements in the community, when 
stimulated by joy or depressed by sor- 
row, when carrying burdens, or when 
buoyed up by prosperity, when sub- 
jected to all the moods and tenses of 
human life — then can he do it ? 

1690. Human Goodness Needs 
Nourishment. — There is in the whole 
human race this vital need, not alone 
of patience, not alone of nourishing 
gentleness, but of forgiveness, of re- 
generation and of upbuilding through 
eternal ages by the power and potency 
which there is in God, rather than by 
any power which there is in them- 
selves. And if you say that this is 
humiliating, it is only that kind of hu- 
mility that the seed has. No seed 
can have life until it has died. If you 
plant a seed, it first decays and then 
springs up and grows by nourishment. 
And if a man thinks he will not be- 
come as a little child, that he may 
enter the kingdom of the Lord Jesus 



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Christ, he never shall be any larger. 
He is a dwarf ; has stopped growing. 

1 69 1. Many-Sided Temptation, — 
In regard to this conflict with spiritual 
foes, look at the figure given by the 
Apostle. I think there never was a 
more striking, easy, off-hand sketch 
than there is here. " Put on," he 
says, "the whole armor of God." 
Why ? Well, in battle, if there is any 
point of exposure, where a spear, an 
arrow or a sword can come in, and 
let out a man's life, he might about as 
well have no armor on. It is very 
well to have a breast-plate ; but if 
your sides are uncovered, and you 
have no greaves, and no other gar- 
ments of protection, you are liable to 
be overcome. A man must put on the 
whole armor ; for he does not know 
on what side the attack may come. 

1692. Obstacles to the Higher Life. 
— If you will row down stream the 
water will not bubble around you a 
particle : it will make your passage 
very easy. But now turn about and 
go up stream, and see how the force of 
the current heaps the water about you. 
So long as a man is content to go 
down stream in life, and does not at- 
tempt to go up stream, he goes easily ; 
but let him undertake to go up stream 
for the sake of a higher life, and see 
if on every side he does not find diffi- 
culties to be overcome and trials to be 
borne. Yet, if he perseveres, by and 
by so many of them will be mastered 
and he will have gained such mo- 
mentum that his career will be, com- 
paratively speaking, joyous, though it 
may not be easy. 

1693. Spiritual Hindrances. — Most 
of us work with what millers call 
"back-water on the wheel" ; as when 
the wheel is so submerged that the 
motive power has to overcome the 
resistance of that which hinders its 
movement. We do not use half of 



ourselves, because we are so sodden 
with care all the time. We are full of 
morbid or malign passions which in- 
terrupt our progress. There is that 
which is worse than back-water on 
the wheel. It is turbid water, it is 
mud, often, on the wheel. And we 
have to use half the force of our life 
in combating hindrances, so that only 
half of it remains with which to do 
the active work. 

1694. The Growth of a Lifetime. — 
Payson, when he lay on his bed dy- 
ing, said, "All my life Christ has 
seemed to me as a star afar off ; but 
little by little he has been advancing 
and growing larger and larger, till 
now his beams seem to fill the whole 
hemisphere, and I am floating in the 
glory of God, wondering with unutter- 
able wonder how such a mote as I 
should be glorified in his light ; " but 
he came to that after a long life. 
Christ had not changed, but Payson 
had gained a larger power of vision. 

1695. Spiritual Grace to be Culti- 
vated. — Suppose a garden should be 
turned over to you, without a thing in 
it, and word should come to you, " If 
you would eat this summer, arise, 
spade, and plant ; " and suppose you 
should say, " What am I, that I should 
undertake to do God's work? If it 
pleases God in his efficiency to raise 
potatoes and fruits and harvests, he 
will do it ; and what am I that I 
should undertake to raise them my- 
self?" You would be laughed at. 
But many people stand before the 
garden of their own soul, and here 
are various traits that God commands 
them to cultivate, and they say, " If 
God means that I shall have those 
traits he will produce them in me : I 
will not interfere with the Divine 
efficiency." But the command is, 
"Work them out." It is not, "Wait 
for them." 



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361 



1696. Matter and Spirit. — Men who 
deny the reality of invisible things are 
like a bulb that should say, "I hear 
people talk about flowers that blossom 
in the air ; but I know nothing about 
any such flowers. All I know about 
is bulbs that grow under ground." 
But do not tulips blossom above the 
earth and in the sunshine ? Matter, 
as it were, is a root under ground ; 
and man's higher nature is the 
flower which lifts itself up above the 
earth, and feeds on the sunlight of 
heaven. 

1697. The Invisible. — I will tell 
you a secret of gardening. Turnips, 
and other crops that have long roots, 
and depend mostly for their nourish- 
ment on the soil, exhaust the soil ; 
while those crops that have broad 
leaves, and take the greater portion of 
their nourishment from the air, organ- 
izing it, and turning it into the soil, 
enrich the soil. What makes this 
life rich is that broad-leaved experi- 
ence which derives its support from 
the air of the future world. 

1698. Permanence of Spiritual 
Gains. — Let a hundred years roll on 
and away, and nothing but these 
evanescent things, valueless in the 
market, remain. All those things for 
which men sell their honor, their 
truth, their purity and their loyalty 
are sunk into the dust. Whatever 
there is of purity, of hope, of gener- 
ous sentiment, of courage, of magna- 
nimity or of fidelity, never dies. As 
the sun draws invisible particles from 
the river and the sea, and holds them 
in the air, cloud-treasures from which 
the earth supplies itself, so each gen- 
eration finds itself compassed about 
with this "great cloud of witnesses," 
that rain down moral influence upon 
generation after generation. All that 
men call real, practical and substan- 
tial is the most perishable. What 



men call imaginary, impracticable 
and theoretic often lives forever. 

1699. The Lower Life Unsatisfying. 
— A man that makes porcelain, off 
which men eat, cannot eat porcelain. 
That which is to hold men's food can- 
not satisfy their appetites. It is not 
your worldly vocations, nor the imme- 
diate results of your worldly vocations, 
that can satisfy you. 

1700. Man's Low Estate. — Forgive 
us the low estate in which we live. 
Forgive us that we dwell so much in 
thoughts that touch only material 
things ; that we dwell in passions that 
do war with the soul ; that we dwell 
so much in the sight of tlie eye, in the 
hearing of the ear, and in the handling 
of the hand ; that the voices to which 
vi'e listen are the voices of men striv- 
ing together in the street ; that we 
spend so much of our time upon things 
that are trifling as the dust, and that, 
like the dust, rise to soil our garments 
— yea, to hide the very brightness of 
the heavens itself. 

1 701. Powrer of Higher Moods. — 
When men are in exalted states, it is 
impossible for them to have care, for 
the same reason that it is impossible 
for an eagle to have dust on his wings 
when he is halfway up to the sun. 
Dust does not go so high. Men that 
live in higher moods have no such be- 
setments as men who live in their 
lower moods. If men are only fer- 
vent, their very fervency carries them 
into an atmosphere where there are 
comparatively few hindrances to an 
ordinary Christian life. Temptation 
shoots with a strong bow, but with a 
short arrow ; and if you fly on a level 
the archer will hit you every time ; 
if you fly high he cannot hit you. 

1702. Solidifying One's Growth. — I 
have around my little cabin in the coun- 
try a dozen or so of rhododendrons. 
Broad-leaved fellows they are. I love 



362 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



tliem in blossom, and I love them out 
of blossom. They make me think of 
many Christians. They are like some 
that are in this church. Usually they 
come up in the spring and blossom 
the first thing, just as many persons 
come into Christian life. The whole 
growth of the plants is crowded into 
two or three weeks, and they develop 
with wonderful rapidity ; but after 
that they will not grow another inch 
during the whole summer. What do 
they do ? I do not know, exactly ; 
they never told me ; but I suspect that 
they are organizing inwardly, and 
rendering permanent that which they 
have gained. What they have added 
to growth in the spring they take the 
rest of the season to solidify, to con- 
solidate, to perfect, by chemical 
evolutions ; and when autumn comes, 
the year's increase is so tough that, 
when the tender plants that laughed 
at these, and chided them, and ac- 
cused them of being lazy, are laid 
low by the frost, there stand my 
rhododendrons, holding out their 
green leaves, and saying to Novem- 
ber and December, "I am here as 
well as you." And they are as green 
to-day as they were before the winter. 
Now, I like Christians that grow 
fast this spring, and hold on through 
the summer, and next spring grow 
again. I like Christians that, having 
grown for a time, stop and organize 
what they have gained, and then 
start again. 

1703, Why Promises Fail. — Many 
a child that is promised a vacation on 
condition that he will perform a cer- 
tain amount of labor, would like the 
vacation, but does not like the condi- 
tion on which it is promised. Many 
a child that is offered a knife or some 
other coveted object on condition that 
he will do such and such disagreeable 
things for so long a time, is eager for 



the reward, but does not like the way 
of obtaining it. And many promises 
of the Word of God are conditioned 
on the doing of things that we do not 
want to do, and the refusing to do 
things that we want to do. 

1704. Steering Godward. — If you 
trace a ray of light in all its reflec- 
tions, you will find that it runs back 
to the central sun; so every great line 
of truth, every great line of heroism, 
every great line of honesty, every 
great line of honor, runs back towards 
the center of God. And the man that 
follows these things knows that he is 
steering right Godward. But the man 
that follows policies, and worldly 
maxims, does not know where he is 
steering, except that in general he is 
steering towards the devil. 

1705. Maturing of Character. — Men 
are like apple-trees. Some apple-trees 
ripen their fruit in July ; while the 
fruit of other trees goes on growing, 
and growing, and growing, through 
August, and September ; and in 
October the farmer picks it off ; and 
then it is green and hard ; and he 
keeps it through November, and 
December, and into January, and it 
is February, when the snow is knee- 
deep, and the tree has lost its leaves, 
before the apple is thoroughly ripe. 
Many of you are just like these late- 
bearing trees. You are bearing good 
fruit, but it will not be ripe till you 
have shed your leaves and gone into 
your winter. So be patient. 

1706. High Spirituality a Late De- 
velopment. — Nor does a person, the 
moment he is converted, enter into 
these higher stages of experience. 
They are the fruit of trial ; they are 
the fruit of life-education ; they are 
the fruit of daily experience running 
through all the vicissitudes of time. I 
tliink the thing may be well illustrated 
by the kindUng of a fire. First the 



SPIRITUAL LIFE 



363 



shavings and kindlers are lighted ; 
they will catch easily ; but they will 
burn out quickly. By and by the 
wood catches, and the first experience 
is smoke — volumes of smoke. You 
have all sorts of little exciting in- 
fluences, and then trouble, uncertainty 
and distress. The smoke pours up 
the chimney, but by and by there is a 
tongue of flame which shoots up a 
momentary jet, and then another jet, 
and pretty soon the fire is in flame all 
over, and the ruddy blaze stretches 
out its arms as if to embrace every- 
thing in the room. After the flame 
dies down, then there is the solid, 
massive hickory in live coals — not in 
leaping flames any longer, but in a 
deep, steady, hot glow. 

1707. Revelation of God. — Has not 
God, say men, a revealing power? 
Can he not, by the power that is in 
him, inject into us a true conception 
and image of himself? I doubt it. 
He could so change human structure, 
that he could throw into the souls of 
men a conception of himself. But 
they would not be the kind of men 
that you and I are. All the power 
there is in the sun, riding like a king, 
day by day, through the heavens, can- 
not make sand — granite sand or flinty 
sand — pure and simple, do anything. 
It goes over the Sahara every day, 
and has been going for I know not 
how many ages. But there is not a 
single plant there, because there is no 
organic life for the sun to act on. Yet 
when it visits the prairie everything 
starts up under its golden beams, for 
there are organized roots there ; and 
when the light and the warmth of the 
sun, with the moisture of the air, act 
on the organization which is wanting 
simply the stimulus, they develop it. 
Human life has organized Hiculties ; 
and the divine stimulus, acting upon 
reason, upon conscience, upon the 



whole cerebral and moral man, wakes 
them, stimulates them to develop 
themselves. . . . We are not then to 
pray for a revelation of God as if God 
could inject it. That is not his way. 
If we pray that we may know more of 
God, we must be more like God. 

1708. Spiritual Development Takes 
Time. — I plant many seeds in my 
garden from which I do not look for 
blossoms the year that I plant them. 
Yet I nourish and transplant them ; 
and when the days of November com- 
mence to cut them down, I take them 
up, roots and all, and hide them in a 
dark frost-proof dwelling for the 
winter. There they rest till the spring 
comes, when I take those buried roots 
and stems, and bring them forth out 
of their graves and put them into a 
better soil. And before September 
comes around in the second year they 
will do what they had not time to do 
in the first. It takes I know not how 
long a series of summers to develop 
the highest blossoms and the truest 
fruit that we can bear. And the work 
is not all done in this life. 

1709. Personal Evidences of Sonship . 
— It is unquestionably true that, now 
and then, the child, being sick, does 
not know its parents ; or that the child, 
being angry, and degenerating to- 
wards the animal conditions, is so ob- 
scured that there are in him all man- 
ner of repulsions from his parents, and 
almost no attractions towards them. 
And yet the child's standing in the 
household can be known by his love 
of his parents ; and this love, this 
affinity, is to him the evidence of rela- 
tionship. 

As it is in the household on earth, 
and in regard to the love of a visible 
parent, so it is in Christ's household. 
The general temper of the mind ; the 
spontaneous rising up of the soul to- 
wards God ; the abiding in that state, 



3^H 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



cither for short recurring periods, or 
for long periods, or even continuously 

all these are more than logical 

proofs, they are experimental proofs ; 
and a man may rest in them, and 
trust to them. 

1 7 10. Concordant Faculties. — 
Many persons play on their hearts as 
a man plays on a violin who knows 
nothing about chording it. The 
strings are loose, and he tries to play 
while they are in that condition, till 
his intolerable screeching distracts the 
whole neighborhood, and they come 
to him, and say, " If you must have 
music, do, for heaven's sake, tune 
your violin!" If it is worth your 
while to play at all, it is worth your 
while to play with your instrument at 
concert-pitch. Now if it is worth your 
while to have Christian experiences at 
all, it is worth your while to have 
them so in harmony with the laws of 
your own mind, and so accordant with 
God's commands, that they shall be 
joyful experiences. 

171 1. Greater Strength, Lighter 
Burden. — If a man is journeying, and 
his sack is heavy, there are two ways 
in which to make it light : one is to 
take it off and throw it away ; the 
other is to increase his strength so that 
he does not feel it. The latter is the 
better way. It is the Divine way. 

1 71 2. The Inward Light. — In a 
great affliction there is no light either 
in the stars or in the sun ; but when 
the inward light is fed with fragrant 
oil, there can be no darkness though 
the sun should go out. Yet when, 
like a sacred lamp in the temple, the 
inward light is quenched, there is no 
light outwardly, though a thousand 
suns should preside in the heavens. 

1713. Christian and Worldly Living. 
— Ordinarily rivers run small at tlie 
beginning, grow broader and broader 
as they proceed, and become widest 



and deepest at the point where they 
enter the sea. It is such rivers that 
the Christian's life is like. But the 
life of the mere worldly man is like 
those rivers in Southern Africa which, 
proceeding from mountain freshets, 
are broad and deep at the beginning, 
and grow narrower and more shallow 
as they advance. They waste them- 
selves by soaking into the sands, and 
at last they die out entirely. 

1 7 14. The Finishing of Character. 
— If you go into a machine-building 
shop, you will find good engines built 
for mines — coal engines — well adapted 
to the purposes for which they were 
designed, and good enough, the 
wheels and all the parts being of right 
proportions and strength, but being as 
rough as though they had been filed 
with the teeth of a harrow. But if 
you go into a mathematical-mstru- 
ment maker's estabhshment, you will 
find his instruments not only admira- 
bly constructed but exquisitely fin- 
ished. The last degree of polish has 
been put upon every single part of 
them. Nothing about them has been 
neglected. Not only are they accu- 
rate, but they are beautiful in accu- 
racy. And you will find all the way 
through the New Testament that it 
teaches that it is not enough for a man 
to simply conform to prescribed rules. 
He must strive for perfectness, inward 
and outward. 

1 715. Living Gospels. — I had a let- 
ter only this week, as I have every 
week, from some young person start- 
ing out in life, asking, " What is the 
best commentary I can have on the 
Bible?" Well, I cannot send them 
this, because the only commentary of 
the Bible that is really of much value 
is a person that is living the Bible ; 
and, really, a Christian is the best 
commentary on the New Testament 
that anybody can have. But there 



SPIRITUAL LIFE 



365 



are not enough of such commentaries 
to send out. The edition is small. 

1716. Do the Near Duty. — If I am 
on picket duty and am commanded to 
watch the enemy, I may entertain my- 
self by thinking what I would do if I 
were a general, on a splendid horse, 
riding in battle ; but I am not a gen- 
eral, and my business consists in be- 
ing a good private on picket duty. It 
is not improper to idealize, and wish 
you were a perfect man ; but, after 
all, the steps towards ideal perfection 
lie in the discharge, with all Christian 
fidelity, of the duties which lie right 
close to you in your daily life. 

1 71 7. Soul-Repmen. — Suppose a 
housekeeper should have in the cup- 
board a bit of cold meat, not over-well 
cooked, and a scrap of bread, and a 
little butter, and should say, when 
she got up in the morning, " I do not 
feel like eating," and should go about 
her work, till eight or nine o'clock, 
and then, feeling faint, should take a 
little handful of meat, and eat it as 
she worked, and at twelve o'clock 
should take another handful, and eat 
that, and about the middle of the 
afternoon eat a little more, and to- 
wards evening a little more ! What 
would you think of such eating? We 
know how the body needs to be fed ; 
and the soul needs to be fed with just 
as much regularity, and with a great 
deal more daintiness and carefulness 
of selection and appropriateness than 
the body. But people do not under- 
stand this, or do not bear it in mind. 
.'\nd in the morning, when they read 
the Bible, they take a passage at ran- 
dom, and some of it is blessed to their 
souls, and some of it is not ; and they 
go shuffling through the day as best 
they can. 

1718. Soul-Health.— What we call 
health, in the body, is a fair analogical 
interpretation of what we call religion. 



Religion in the soul is what the right 
use of the organs is to the body. 
What is health ? Simply a name for 
the right action of the whole physical 
frame : and when a man's intellect, 
and disposition, and soul ; each part 
and faculty ; the reason, the imagina- 
tion, the affections, and all the appe- 
tites and passions underneath them, 
are held in subordination to each 
other in harmony, there is health of 
the soul ; and we call that religion. 

1 71 9. Pride Softened by Love. — 
When a man's pride is thoroughly 
subdued, it is like the sides of Mount 
Etna. It was terrible while the erup- 
tion lasted and the lava flowed ; but 
when that is past, and the lava is 
turned into soil, it grows vineyards 
and olive trees up to the very top. 

1720. Many Called: Few Chosen. 
— If you say that many of those who 
make a profession of religion do not 
live in accordance with that profes- 
sion, my reply is that it is with this as 
with other things. You never saw an 
apple-tree that did not have fifty blos- 
soms where there was one that set and 
came to fruit. And it may be true 
that in a community where fifty men 
are impressed with religion only one 
will become a ripe Christian, while all 
the rest will more or less lose their im- 
pressions, and relapse into different 
degrees of inferiority all the way down. 
The imperfections of the processes of 
religion are no argument against their 
reality. They are as real as the proc- 
esses of education, and business, and 
the mechanic arts. 

1 72 1. The World the Place for 
Christianity. — I should like to know 
what use there is in a man's learning 
navigation from books if he is never 
allowed to steer a ship. What is the 
use of what a man learns from lectures 
on organic chemistry and agriculture 
if he is never allowed to plow a furrow 



366 



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or cultivate a crop? . . . God de- 
signed the sanctuary, the lecture- 
room, and the Bible as the places 
where we are to learn what we are to 
do and to be, and the world as the 
place where we are to do it and be it. 

1722. The School of Christ. — When 
Raphael was executing the various 
frescoes which he was commissioned 
to paint by the Roman Papal govern- 
ment, he drew the figures, determin- 
ing the subjects, and grouping the 
different elements. He worked the 
designs out with his pencil. Then he 
put them into his scholars' hands, and 
they went on and filled them out. 
And after they had done the best they 
could, when their part of the work 
was completed, Raphael was accus- 
tomed to take his pencil and give the 
pictures a last finish. And so he was 
the author and the finisher of the pic- 
tures worked upon by these his disci- 
ples. We are of Christ's school. He 
lays out the work. We execute some 
of its intermediate stages, while his 
grace perfects what we do. And if 
we were in a condition of true spirit- 
ual-mindedness, we should feel that it 
was an unspeakable favor that we 
were permitted to work out these 
blessed figures, these glorious natures, 
these living pictures, which are to 
shine forever and forever in the heav- 
enly land. 

1723. God's Modeling of Man's 
Clay. — Did you ever see a sculptor 
make a statuette or statue ? He be- 
gins with dirt, you know. He has a 
few rude sticks, or iron, for a frame ; 
and then he slaps on the clay ; and 
when it is tempered about right, he 
roughs out the general form ; and then 
he begins to scrape off the surplus. 
Now he works for symmetry, and 
lines, grace, and proportions. And 
then he works for resemblances. And 
at last, as the work is becoming con- 



summated, he puts on the finest 
touches. And all the way through 
it is dirt, dirt, dirt ! 

But, though this is a dirty business, 
it is not half so dirty as bringing up 
men in this world of temptation and 
passion, where all their desires are 
overflowing like a flood. Yet, as the 
sculptor goes on working thus with 
this lifeless material, to bring out 
at last the finest lines and linea- 
ments, that the model, when com- 
pleted, may be transmuted into the 
glowing marble, or bronze, or silver, 
or gold, as the case may be, so God 
is dealing with us ; so he is building 
us up ; he is taking off and putting 
on, that after a while, when the work 
is completed, we may be transmuted 
into higher forms, and be as pillars in 
the temple of our God, and become 
men in Christ Jesus. 

1724. The Continuing Regeneration. 
— Dearly-beloved brethren. Christians 
all, have you been born again? Have 
you been born again and again and 
again ? Have you gone up step by step, 
through the lower, intermediate, and 
into the higher experiences ? You 
have gone into the outskirts of the 
moral kingdom, the religious, the 
spiritual ; have you gone higher than 
that ? What is there higher than 
spiritual? There is this that is higher 
than spiritual — quality, quantity, har- 
mony. Here is the organ, and as the 
builder builds one part after another, 
all its sub-bases, diapasons, and all 
the other instruments represented in 
it, it is full of cacophony as he sounds 
one stop, then another and another. 
By and by he has brought them all 
together, and he tries and proves them 
till they are brought into harmony 
with each other, and he voices the or- 
gan so that the effect shall be the 
sweetest possible, and then, when at 
last it is all there, in perfect harmony 



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367 



with itself, and the voicing has given 
to every stop its very sweetest tone.then 
we say it is completed. Have you 
come to that condition ? Does grace 
harmonize from the top clear down to 
the bottom, and has it come not occa- 
sionally and forced, but has it come 
to the condition of spontaneity, auto- 
matic, so that without thinking you do 
the things that are right ? 

1725. Orthodoxy and Christianity. 
— The sweetest characters that live 
are oftentimes outside your own 
church and orthodoxy. You are 
obliged to confess, you Calvinist, that 
a man may be just as good a Chris- 
tian as you are, and be an Arminian. 
You are obliged to confess that here 
and there you find a man who dis- 
dains all church economy and ordi- 
nances, and yet is as sweet a pattern 
of a Christian man as ever was born 
in the Quaker household. " My 
mother was a Universalist, yet there 
never was a Christian like her." You 
bring it to your minister, and he says : 
"Yes, that maybe a single instance." 
Single instances are like single wedges 
that spht knotty logs. 

1726. Bearing the Cross. — God 
gives everybody, I think, a cross, 
when he enters upon a Christian life. 
When it comes into his hands, what is 
it ? It is the rude oak, four-square, 
full of splinters and slivers, and rudely 
tacked together. And after forty years 
I see some men carrying their cross 
just as rude as it was at first. Others, 
I perceive, begin to wind around about 
it faith, and hope, and patience ; and 
after a time, like Aaron's rod, it blos- 
soms all over. And at last their cross 
has been so covered with holy affec- 
tions that it does not seem any more 
to be a cross. They carry it so easily, 
and are so much more strengthened 
than burdened by it, that men almost 
forget that it is a cross. 



1727. Enlarging Ideal of God. — If 
one be of a devout nature, his concep- 
tion of the Divine nature will begin to 
enlarge and fill out in every direction, 
if only there is a real, active, earnest 
moral life going on within him. In 
this work, the imagination will be the 
architect, reason will be the master- 
builder, and the materials will come 
largely from his personal qualities and 
his own experience. 

1728. Christian Activity. — How 
many began life as the worm begins 
it, and fed voraciously until they were 
full, and then silently sloughed their 
worm-skin, and spun around about 
them a silken house ! They retired 
from life. And you shall find a great 
many such Christian worms, that have 
had the benefit of the whole summer, 
and have retired from activity, as in 
these silk-wound cocoons the chrysa- 
lis waits for the next summer. The 
chrysalis is not a fool. There is a 
next summer for him. But if a man 
attempts to do the same thing ; if he 
feeds upon all God's bounties, and 
only succeeds in spinning out of his 
own bowels a silken dwelling, to wrap 
himself up in, there is no next summer 
to him. He will never come to be a 
butterfly, though the chrysalis will, 
and will rise up in judgment against 
him. That which is very well for a 
bug, is very poor for a Christian. 

1729. Joy and Sorrow. — Men have 
come to think that tears are more 
sacred than smiles. No. Laughing 
is as divine as crying. There are men 
who think that sorrow has something 
in it more wonderfully divine than joy. 
Sorrow is divine ; but joy was divine 
first, and will be after Aveeping and 
sorrow are swept out of the universe. 
Joy is more divine than sorrow ; for 
joy is bread, and sorrow is medicine. 

1730. Some Discouragement 
Wholesome. — No men are so apt to 



368 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



be discouraged as those who are hv- 
ing far up along the scale. They 
judge themselves by a high ideal of 
life. It does no hurt for a man to be 
enough discouraged to keep down 
pride and vanity ; but discourage- 
ment is a mephitic gas which, if long 
continued, strikes the vital parts, and 
destroys life. A little lowering of the 
tone of a man's self-conceit, however, 
stands in the lieu of humility, and 
keeps him from being arrogant and 
over-weening. 

1 731. Spiritual Kindred. — Do not 
you suppose, when I stood and 
dropped tears over the grave of He- 
loise in the Pere-la-Chaise that I felt 
that she was mine ? Too noble was 
she for Abelard, who knew not how 
to love. The truest and largest 
woman of the whole Mediaeval period 
of the world was she. And she is not 
dead. Nor is she remote from me. 
She lived in another country, and she 
spoke another language ; but it is 
thought, and affection, and purpose, 
and divinity that make us kindred. 
And I find my brethren, some in the 
dungeon, some at the stake, and some 
under the gallows. I find them in the 
hovels of the slave and in the hut of 
the poor mariner. 

If I find that which moves the life 
of men to be the development of all 
that is sweet and divine in them, I 
have a right, in the language of 
Christ's declaration, to say of them. 
Behold my 7nother! behold my sister ! 
behold 7ny brother! 

1732. Noble Burden-Bearing. — 
Have you never noticed that the most 
stately persons that walk the streets 
are not the children of ease ? Go with 
me, and I will show you a poor woman 
that goes week by week to get her 
burden of washing, and who, lifting it 
to her head, and poising it there that 
she may be able to carry it, is obliged 



to walk with the step of a queen. The 
most stately walkers are those that 
carry burdens on their head. It is not 
the men that walk negligently and 
carelessly, but the men that have 
learned to carry their troubles with 
sobriety and manliness, that are the 
noblest natures. 

1733. Measurements of Things 
Worldly. — The world is God's nurs- 
ery. Here he brings up his children. 
And, as in our houses all things are 
good — pictures, books, carpets, furni- 
ture, the table and the couch — if they 
aid us to rear well our children, and 
are good but for that ; as our children 
are themselves the chief treasures to 
us, and their character the chief part 
of themselves, so is it in God's great 
household-globe, on which we dwell. 
We are to despise nothing as if the 
being transient or physical were a 
reason for contempt. We are to 
treasure all things — only we are to 
measure their value by their relation 
to our higher nature. 

1734. " By their Fruits.'' — Is there 
anything in ecclesiasticism that Prot- 
estants repudiate so much as Roman 
CathoHcism ? And yet, when the war 
is raging, and there is pestilence in 
the camp, and men are sick and 
dying in the hospitals, let those meek- 
eyed Sisters of Mercy go there and 
minister to the wants of Protestant 
boys, being tender and gentle with 
them, never seeking to breathe any 
ideas into their minds that their 
mothers would not, night and day 
walking in and out full of disinter- 
estedness and delicacy, and diffusing 
about them an influence of cheer and 
hope ; and let those noble boys go 
home ; and let any man dare to speak 
a word against these kind creatures, 
and they will turn with clenched 
hand, and say, " I will beat you to 
the dust if you speak against them, as 



SPIRITUAL LIFE 



3^9 



quick as if you spoke against my 
mother or my sister ! " 

What has overcome their prejudice 
against the Cathohcs? Is it the edict 
of the Pope? Is it the arguments of 
the priests ? Is it the influence of the 
adherents of that church ? Is it any 
charm of its service ? No, it is the 
pure hves of some of its members. 
Those are arguments which no man 
wants to refute. If there were more 
such lives there would be less 
atheism. 

1735- Beauty of Moral Character. — 
All these elements, then — long-suffer- 
ing, humility, patience, simplicity, 
purity, truth — are intrinsically beauti- 
ful. Any one of them, taken 
separately, is beautiful ; and when 
they are conjoined, human language 
has no terms of praise sufficient to 
describe them. The beauty of moral 
conduct is, in many respects, like that 
to which music is an analogy, and is 
a higher form of it. Single sounds 
are sweet and beautiful ; and yet they 
are the lowest forms of music. A 
succession of sounds, or melodies, 
rises still higher. Combinations of 
sound in harmony rise higher yet. 
When the symphonic forms are taken, 
and sounds are not sounds alone but 
are expressions of qualities, and feel- 
ings, and movements, and life itself, 
then we reach the highest form of 
musical ecstasy. 

1736. The Use of Superiority. — 
" Let every one of us please his 
neighbor." Well, is it the business of 
life, to go around tickling men's 
fancies, making them happy, that 
they enjoy themselves? "Let every 
one of us please h.\s neighbor for /lis 
good." That does not mean that a 
man should be forever, with saws and 
wise sentences, talking, and making 
himself a bore in society. Ye that 
are strong, ye that are wise, and ye 



that are good, do not use the best of 
your life spinning silken thread for the 
embroidery of that life, but please 
your neighbor; and so please him as 
to make him a better man. Make him 
happy in the direction of his soul's 
profit. 

1737. Fidelity in Labor. — Go with me 
to Mansfield, Connecticut, and I will 
show you ten thousand worms eating 
mulberry leaves, and making a noise 
like rain pouring on a roof. When 
they are about done eating, you will 
see them commence, with strange 
antics, to weave a sepulchral cocoon. 
They are going to sleep, They do 
not know what for. Their instinct 
does not teach them that. It only 
teaches them to build their tombs out 
of their bodies. They draw out the 
glutinous matter into a fine thread, 
and wind it around and around them ; 
and finally they close up the orifice 
and go to sleep ; and there they lie. 
Then comes a man who takes those 
cocoons. After some little prepara- 
tion he unwinds the silk. And then it 
is spun ; and then it is woven ; and 
then it is dyed ; and then it is shaped ; 
and a queenly form wears the gor- 
geous silk ; and it is the admiration 
of all people round about. 

When God puts on the robe, the 
threads or films of which you have 
worked out in this life ; when he puts 
together the various parts of the 
garment which you are helping to 
make, you will be glad of everything 
you have done, if you have done it 
faithfully. 

1738. Native Gifts no Standard for 
Measure. — What would be thought of 
a man who should judge whether he 
was a man or not by the inches of 
a man broader and taller than him- 
self? A man can be a man five feet 
six, as well as six feet five. You may 
be a Christian and yet have a less 



370 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



glowing experience than some other 
Cluibtians have. Your gifts may be 
dilTerent from those of other Chris- 
tians. God works in every man ac- 
cording as it pleases him. There were 
twelve disciples, and yet only one of 
tiiem laid his head in the bosom of 
Christ. 

1739. Disposition and Volition. — 
Men who are ordinarily courageous 
sometimes become cowards for a mo- 
ment, but suddenly fly back, like a 
spring, to their former condition. 
Courage is their natural state. Men 
who are ordinarily cowards oc- 
casionally become courageous ; but 
their natural state is timidity. So in 
respect to refinements ; some men 
live in them. They appreciate that 
which is fine and beautiful, and they 
seek it, and are unhappy without it. 
They may at times become coarse 
and rude, but it is not natural to them 
to be so. Others are habitually gross 
and vulgar. They may occasionally 
be elevated into a state of nobleness, 
and purity, and refinement, and good 
taste, but this is not their ordinary 
state. 

We see the same thing in business 
life. Some men are habitually 
generous. Sometimes emergencies 
take them off their guard, and cause 
them to depart from their usual 
mood ; but this is not common with 
them. On the other hand, many men 
are crabbed, and knavish, and selfish, 
and hard, and ugly. They surprise 
everybody, once in a while, by doing 
a good and generous deed, and by 
manifesting a sweet temper ; but this 
state, in their case, is only temporary. 

These are illustrations drawn from 
common life, to show what I mean by 
a state or disposition, in distinction 
from a special volition. 

1740. Sunday Christians. — There 
are insects that fly at night, phosphor- 



escing light when they have a mind 
to, flashing and shutting up ; like Chris- 
tians that flash on Sunday, and shut 
up all the week, flying through the 
dust of business! Such are not our 
models. 

1741. Rationalism. — I like these 
brave rationalists ! They are the men 
that say, " Oh ! give us the precepts of 
the New Testament ; but as to the ma- 
chinery of religion," their thought is, 
" it may be all right, or it may not." 
They are precisely like a man who 
says, "Give me apples; but I hate 
apple-trees." As though he could get 
fruit without anything for it to grow 
on ! The fruit has to be produced 
and stimulated by religious culture. 

1742. Am I a Christian? — If you 
want to know whether there are chest- 
nuts on a tree or not, you look on the 
ground, and if you find any there, you 
know that there are more where they 
came from. Go and see where the 
fruit of your Christianity is. It is not 
in your hymns — anybody can sing 
hymns ; it is not in your prayers — any 
man can make prayers ; it is not in 
your hope — who has not a hope of 
one sort or another? Neither is it in 
a mere profession. If you are a Chris- 
tian, it is because the grace of God is 
given you by the Holy Ghost in the 
form of love, which works in both 
directions — Godvvard and manward. 

1743. Head and Heart. — The Apostle 
Paul declared that the true religious 
life is to be sought, not by intellectual 
processes, but by moral states or intui- 
tions, and by no other ; and that it is 
the power which springs from moral 
intuitions which makes the cross of 
Christ the chosen means by which to 
convert the world. In other words, 
while Greece had taken the scepter 
of understanding, and gone forth to 
subdue barbarous nations, thereby to 
bring them into culture, Paul took 



SPIRITUAL LIFE 



371 



mightier weapons — tlie heart, not the 
understanding — and declared that with 
that he would develop a power that 
should be mightier than reason. And 
he did. 

1744. Unconscious Goodness. — A 
farmer puts the grain bags into his 
wagon, and drives slowly home. As 
the wagon jolts over the stony road, 
one of the bags becomes untied, and 
the grain is scattered along the way. 
The birds catch some, fly off with it, 
and drop it in distant places. Some 
is blown in different directions by the 
winds. But the next summer finds 
the scattered seed ; it starts, and 
grows, and when the farmer sees his 
own grain he does not know it. He 
did not even know that he lost it. 
And so with good deeds. Men often 
perform them unconsciously, and they 
bear fruit ; and when they see that 
fruit they do not know that it is the 
result of anything they have done. 

1745. Highest Joys of Life. — When 
the world is spiritually contemplated, 
in connection with the world to come, 
it not only is not diminished in its 
revenues and treasures of joy, it be- 
comes finer, sweeter, nobler. 

Men, for the most part, do not 
know how to find the honey in the 
things of this world. You would never 
suspect where the honey of a flower 
is ; or, if you did, too large is your 
hand to be thrust in to get it. But 
the insect buries itself in the flower, 
and then, with a prehensile instru- 
ment, far-reaching, searches the cells 
for the honey, and draws out the 
hidden stores. Its very fineness gives 
to it what your coarseness withholds 
from you. We are not fine enough 
to discover the joy that is hidden in 
many of the relations of this life. 

1746. Abiding Joy. — How much 
do we know of joy ? A good deal, 
of a kind of rough, bouncing, boy- 



hood joy ; but how much of joy as a 
garment which one wears, shining like 
silver, ruddy and radiant as gold ? 
Who knows what joy is, as an abiding 
state of mind, such that it is by day 
and by night in him uttering itself in 
all sweetness and all melody? Men 
see joy flash ; they see it sparkle ; 
they know what it is as an intermit- 
tent, limited experience ; but who 
knows it in its sweet majesty and 
power ? 

1747. " Righteousness and Peace." 
— Peace does not mean the absence 
of disturbance. Peace is a positive 
quality. It is the highest condition 
in which correlated faculties can ex- 
ist. It is intense tranquillity. When 
the strongest feelings are in accord, 
the highest excitement is the most 
peaceful state. . . . 

When you hear one of the noblest 
strains of Beethoven's symphonies, in 
ten or twelve different parts, it seems 
like one sound. Take those parts 
from each other, separate them, throw 
them against each other, and they 
agitate one another ; but when they 
are perfectly concordant all the instru- 
ments swell together with their differ- 
ent natures, and are completely har- 
monious. When one feeling alone is 
excited, its excitement is disturbing, 
and the other feehngs are in conflict ; 
but when the whole mind is excited 
together, and concordantly, there is 
no disturbance, but all is peace — a 
peace of vitality. It is one of the 
noblest, highest, best and most com- 
prehensive of feelings, 

1748. Divine Love in the Soul. — 
The heart beginning to love is like a 
bay into which the star-drawn tides 
are rushing. The waters come with 
violence. They stir up the sand and 
sediment. They dash and murmur 
on the edges of the shore. They 
whirl and chafe about the rocks, and 



372 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



the whole bay is agitated with strife 
and counter-strife of swirHng waters, 
until they have nearly reached their 
height. Then, when great depth is 
gained, when the shores are full, the 
bay begins to tranquillize itself; and 
effacing every wrinkle, and blowing 
out every bubble, and hushing every 
ripple along the shore, it looks up with 
an open and tranquil face into the 
sky, and reflects clearly the sun and 
moon that have drawn it thither. And 
so does the soul, while filling, whirl 
with disquiet, and fret its edges with 
wrinkles and eddies ; but when it is 
filled with love, it rests and looks 
calmly up, and reflects the image of 
its God. 

1749. Victorious Goodness Must be 
Strong. — The command is not alone : 
Endure evil, be patient with evil, but 
Overcome it. Where is the army, 
where is the sword, where are the 
banners, what are the means of over- 
coming ? Goodness ! Have you good- 
ness enough on hand ? Christians are 
like folks that have brushes and a pal- 
ette, but not much paint. When they 
undertake to establish good and over- 
come evil, the qualities, the pigments, 
are wanting. A languid, low-toned 
color of goodness never overcomes 
anything. It must be positive, full of 
blood, radiant as an angel. Then a 
man shall go out with a conception of 
goodness into the community, and 
wherever he goes he will carry con- 
viction to evil, so far as conviction 
can be produced at all, 

1750. Earthly Immortality. — When 
the sun disappears below the horizon 
he is not down. The heavens glow 
for a full hour after his departure. 
And when a great and good man sets, 
the west is luminous long after he is 
out of sight. A godly man who lives 
unselfishly and disinterestedly, cannot 
die out of this world. When he goes 



hence, he leaves behind much of him- 
self — sometimes that which thousands 
of years have not worn out. The 
earth has Socrates and Plato to this 
day. The world is richer yet by 
Moses and the old prophets than by 
the wisest statesmen. 

175 1. True Meekness. — Meekness 
is not simply unprovokableness ; for 
then they that had the stupidest brains 
would be the most meek. There is no 
discord possible on the bass-viol to a 
string that has not been brought to 
any tension. And it is very easy for 
a man to be patient when he is not 
hurt and can't be hurt, because there 
is no nerve struck. The white-faced 
men that go through life as if they 
were enameled, are not meek, by any 
means. It is where a man is fully 
equipped ; it is where he is sensitive ; 
it is where he discerns between right 
and wrong, pure and impure — be- 
tween the things that ought to be, and 
the things that ought not to be : it is 
there that meekness has its sovereign 
field. It is gentleness and kindness 
when strong natures are subject to 
great provocation. 

1 75 2 . Divinity of Meekness. — M eek- 
ness does not imply a quietude of mind 
in the presence of injuries on account 
of insensibility ; nor from languid and 
weak disposition ; nor upon any selfish 
calculation of advantage, as a politi- 
cian suppresses his righteous indigna- 
tion in the hope of more votes, or as a 
merchant suppresses his disgust at a 
mean man on the other side of the 
counter in the expectation of bargains : 
that is not meekness ; that is the cal- 
culation of selfishness. Meekness is 
the suppression of all anger, and all 
cruelty, in the soul itself, on account 
of one's benevolent desire forthegood 
of another. There is no place in life 
where a man can so test the force of 
divine love in himself as to be able to 



SPIRITUAL LIFE 



373 



bear with another who is thrusting 
poisoned darts at his very hfe. That 
is meekness ; and it is divine. 

1753. Quiet Power of Meekness. — In 
the crowd of deceits, meekness in its 
true colors and dignity towers high to- 
wards tlie heaven in an unclouded sky, 
white as the snow on Mont Blanc — 
but not, like it, unfruitful, frigid and 
lonely in its dangerous solitude. For, 
white as snow and radiant as snow, it 
is as warm as the summer showers are. 
It is not bloodless ; it is not pulseless, 
though calm ; it is not torpid, though 
it be peaceful ; it is not without power, 
though it is at rest. It shall not strive, 
nor cry, neither shall a man hear its 
voice in the street — that was of Christ 
said, and of him because he was a 
prince of meekness. 

1754. Heaven above the Earth. — 
Heaven answers with us the same 
purpose that the tuning-fork does with 
the musician. Our affections are apt 
to get below the concert-pitch, and 
we take heaven to tune our hearts by. 

1755. To Escape Life's Storms. — 
Standing upon Mount Holyoke, I have 
heard the thunder below, and seen 
men traveling up the side, in haste to 
get out of the storm. Standing higher 
than they, I escaped the pelting rain, 
the wind and the lightning. When 
they reached the top of the mountain 
they, too, were free from the storm. 
Many storms there are that lie low, 
hugging the ground ; and the way to 
escape them is to get higher than they. 

1756. Minor Events and Great Ex- 
periences. — When I stood upon the 
Corner Grat, in Switzerland, right 
above me were Mounts Rosa, Breit- 
horn and Matterhorn. A hundred 
smaller swells and peaks there were, 
which if alone would have been com- 
manding, but which in the presence of 
these grander summits one did not 
see. They were but so many ap- 



proaches to the higher mountains, and 
seemed to serve them, to finish off 
their lines of grandeur and beauty. 
So in human life, myriads of separate 
events in our consciousness run to- 
gether, and report themselves as units 
in some few great experiences which 
swallow up the individuality of those 
elements that once had a special 
sphere, and seemed important. 

1757. Last Day of the Year. — If 
there is anything which you would 
cast back into memory, as men upon 
the broad ocean cast some object into 
its waters, saying to it, " Farewell, I 
shall never see thee again," so cast 
out all hatred, all revenge, all sins, all 
wrong. For one day in the year let the 
surface of the soul be in a condition in 
which like a photographic plate it will 
reflect the light, the hneaments, the at- 
tributes of God himself, 

1758. Retrospection. — Grant to us, 
our Father, that wisdom by which we 
may draw honey and not bitterness 
from the flowers that grew in the 
past. 

1759. Shining Days, — Our life here 
is to the whole of our after and better 
life as single days in winter that shine 
with some warmth are to the full vol- 
ume of summer. O, make those days 
touch each other that are the days of 
the Son of Man in us ! May they 
spread into weeks and into months ; 
and by and by may we dwell as in the 
very tropics, under the perpetual shin- 
ing of the Sun of Righteousness. 

1760. Persistent Spiritual Effort. — 
Nothing noble in life is ever attained 
by languid zeal. The kingdom of 
heaven must suffer violence. Whether 
in art, in knowledge, in refinement, but 
more eminently than all, in spiritual 
power, no man can be victorious who 
does not put forth his best force, and 
with unremittting persistence. A soul 
that vibrates between things high and 



374 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



low, good and evil, spiritual and secu- 
lar, like a pendulum, will be forever 
traveling without making progress. 

1 761. Perseverance. — When a man 
seeks to see Rome from the dome of 
St. Peter's, every step that he takes in 
the long winding passages is wise if he 
takes them all ; but if he goes half- 
way up, and no further, the fact that 
he has gone so far is of no account. 
Not one of the steps that he has taken 
counts until he has taken the last one ; 
and then the whole count. For that 
which he is to see is to be seen only 
when he stands on the summit, and 
looks out upon the adjacent country. 
And there are many things in this world 
which, though they are good if you 
carry them through, amount to noth- 
ing if you stop anywhere but at the 
last stage. 

1762. The End Crowns the Work. 
— It is not the first part of the voyage, 
but. the last part, that tells whether it 
is a successful voyage or not. The 
ship De Witt Clinton lies on the coast 
just below here, disabled. The pros- 
perity of twenty-six days she lost on the 
twenty-seventh, when coming into the 
harbor. However prosperous your 
life may be here, if you stick on the 
shore, and do not come in on the 
other life, you are a wreck ! You 
must take care of the last part of the 
voyage, or you take care of nothing. 

1763. Luminous Hours after Dark- 
ness. — Jesus, being under human con- 
ditions, was discouraged. Therefore 
he ascended into the Divine commun- 
ion ; and it pleased God, by the 
opening of the heavens, and by those 
messengers of the Old Dispensation 
that were adapted to pour balm and 
consolation into his heart who was 
working for the New, to give him re- 
invigoration. 

O man of God, preaching in the 
wilderness, tired, disheartened, and 



accusing yourself of a want of cour- 
age and faith, your Master was tired, 
and needed angelic ministration to set 
him up for his work ! 

O woman in some despoiled neigh- 
borhood, bearing the burden of the 
household, and longing to do some- 
thing for the needy, unhelped, 
discouraged, and often wishing your- 
self dead, you tread in the footsteps 
of him who once walked the earth, 
but who now reigns in heaven ! 

O ye that are seeking the world's 
gain, either in your family or in tlie 
community, do not be ashamed that 
you experience hours of deep depres- 
sion ; Christ had them, and he 
sanctified them to the good of men. 
Like him, too, you may have times of 
luminousness and emancipation. On 
the mountain-top, unexpectedly, in the 
night, when all is darkness, there may 
come to you the radiancy of a reve- 
lation from the heavenly land ! 

1764. The Heavenly Vision. — On 
some days there are no tears in our 
eyes, and no sorrow in our hearts ; 
some days there are on which we 
cleave, as birds do, the air, without 
hindrance, and sing at the gate of 
heaven. We do not ask that these 
experiences shall be multiplied. We 
would not build upon the Mount of 
Transfiguration tabernacles in which 
we may dwell apart from the earth in 
selfish joy and purity ; but give to us 
so often the heavenly vision that we 
shall be able to walk perpetually with 
God, as in his very presence. 

1765. The Peace of God. — When 
the tide has been coming in, I have 
often seen how it chafed and fretted, 
running into some narrow-mouthed 
bay, filling it, swirling round, and 
lapping up on the shores, till by and 
by, still flowing, and flowing, and 
flowing, it filled the bay full. The 
tide had spent itself: there ran a 



UNSELFISH LOVE 



375 



smoothing ripple all over the surface, 
and the whole bay at last was at 
rest. And so the soul, while yet it is 
being filled, is disturbed by ripples and 



eddies ; but by and by, when it shall 
have been filled full of the power and 
presence of God, it will be satisfied, 
perfectly at peace, full of joy. 



XXX. UNSELFISH LOVE 



1766. The Greatest is Love. — Now 
abide these three : Faith, by which we 
see the glories of the eternal sphere ; 
Hope, by which we mount towards 
them ; and Love, by which we grasp 
and inherit them : therefore, the great- 
est of these is Love. 

Love, amid the other graces in this 
world, is like a cathedral tower, which 
begins on the earth, and is at first sur- 
rounded by the other parts of the 
structure; but at length, rising above 
buttressed wall, and arch, and para- 
pet, and pinnacle, it shoots spire-like 
many a foot right into the air, so high 
that the huge cross on its summit 
glows like a spark in the morning 
light, and shines like a star in the 
evening sky, when the rest of the pile 
is enveloped in darkness. So, Love, 
here, is surrounded by the other graces, 
and divides the honors with them ; 
but they will have felt^ the wrap of 
night and of darkness when it will 
shine, luminous, against the sky of 
eternity. 

1767. Virtues Dependent on Love. 
— We ask God for faith ; we ask him 
for patience ; for spiritual insight ; for 
joy ; for various higher developments. 
But, my friends, these are tropical 
plants, and they never grow in any 
climate but a climate as hot as love. 
Suppose a person were to plant orange 
and lemon trees in Canada, and pray 
God to give him big crops ! If a man 
will go to the southern part of Florida, 
he need not pray much to get large 
crops of oranges and lemons ; but if 
he goes to Kamtschatka, he cannot 
get them by any amount of praying. 



And we must have right conditions, 
or we cannot have right virtues. 

1768. Lowly Service. — The wash- 
ing of feet is, I think, a part of the 
New Testament that many folks would 
like expunged. Men are quite willing 
to serve each other on the higher 
plane, where their service is a rebound 
of joy in themselves ; very few are 
willing to descend to the other end of 
human life and wash the feet — the 
lowest and most menial service of a 
slave. Yet that was what the Son of 
Man did. Many are fierce for the 
Trinity, fierce for the Atonement, 
fierce for all the interlocked doctrines, 
but they are not at all anxious about 
washing feet. 

1769. Life Needs Love. — There are 
millions of things growing around 
about us to-day which, if there were 
a change of the movement of the 
earth in the ecliptic such as should 
bring fifty degrees of cold down into 
our latitude, would all perish. And 
what cold is in nature, that the ab- 
sence of love is in the moral realm of 
the world. 

1770. Love Seeks the Lowest. — 
Every great-hearted teacher, who 
once has undertaken to care for his 
school, takes in the bottom of the 
class as really as the top. If a teacher 
be of a large nature, he hovers with 
more compassion over the dull and 
furthest behind, than over the bright, 
that make the easiest leaps, and reach 
the highest. 

When you address yourself to the 
work of sympathy for the purpose of 
doing good to a soul, then the need of 



37^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



that soul becomes the argument and 
the measure of your own compassion. 
What child could not take a piece of 
soft pine, whose grain all runs one 
way, and easily whittle it? But to 
take a piece of lignum vitit, that is 
almost like metal for hardness, and 
whose fibers run in every direction, 
and whittle that, is a different matter. 
The intense interest goes with the 
necessity that there has been for forth- 
putting, and skill, and patience and 
power. 

1 77 1 . " Love Believeth All Things. 
— The right spirit does not believe 
with credulity ; nevertheless, trust is 
its prevailing disposition. 

Count Cavour, the ablest statesman 
in modern Europe, Bismarck not ex- 
cepted, said one thing which, from a 
statesman's point of view, coincides 
with this deep interior life which 
Paul sets forth. He said, as the re- 
sult of his experience, that he believed 
that he who trusted men would make 
fewer mistakes than he who distrusted 
them. Yet diplomacy has always 
gone on the theory of distrusting 
everybody, according to the principle 
of the Italian Machiavelli. "Love 
believeth all things" ; and when the 
facts do not seem to square with be- 
lief it " hopeth all things"; and 
when hope fails, it "endureth all 
things." It is like the sun, which 
pours its light and warmth on man, 
woman, and child everywhere. 

1772. Loving Our Enemies. — You 
that are perplexed about the divinity 
of Christ ; you that do not under- 
stand the doctrine of election or the 
doctrine of the Trinity ; you that 
are very much troubled on the sub- 
ject of the Atonement, and the rela- 
tions of vicarious suffering to everlast- 
ing justice ; you who are at a loss to 
understand the subject of affection as 
it relates to God — here is a doctrine 



that is a great deal harder than any 
of those. It is the language of your 
Master : "I say unto you, Love your 
enemies." 

You say, " How can I love a man 
who is wicked?" That is your own 
lookout. Here is the passage. "How 
can I love hatefulness? " God loves 
hateful men — not haleful««5. 

We are to feel towards enemies just 
as the spring feels towards frozen 
ground, when it comes from the 
south, warm, moist, generous, and 
unlocking, and, by that which it 
brings from the equator, releases the 
frigid north from its thrall and its 
death. Out of your warm life breathe 
that upon your enemies which shall 
bring them to their true selves. 

1773. The Meek Shall Inherit the 
Earth. — Had the air been filled with 
eagles and vultures and hawks among 
which Jesus threw up a white dove, 
saying, " Blessed be the dove, it shall 
rule all the air," it would scarcely 
have seemed more strange. Had he 
sent a little lamb into the wilderness 
among the bears, and wolves, and 
lions, saying, " It shall go forth and pre- 
vail against them all," it would not have 
seemed more unlikely of accomphsh- 
ment. Had he taken a sucking child 
from its mother's arms and appointed it 
ruler over warriors, or the beasts of the 
wilderness, it would have been no less 
reasonable. And yet, our Lord had 
only to go back to the prophecies 
which respected himself, to find every 
one of these figures expressly em- 
ployed, in spirit at least, for the very 
same end ; and the world is finding 
them gradually fulfilled. 

1774. Love-Element in St. Paul. 
— No one, it seems to me, can have 
read attentively the teachings of the 
Apostle Paul and entered into the 
spirit in which he worked, without 
having seen under all his feelings and 



UNSELFISH LOVE 



377 



experiences the influence of this im- 
mense love-principle. In him it took 
on a more enthusiastic form than it 
did in the Saviour. It was, as one 
might say, more a novelty with him. 
It was the eternal state of the Saviour, 
widely diffused and developed, and 
like a native atmosphere, such as en- 
velops the whole earth. In the apos- 
tle it seems more like an intense or 
concentrated inspiration. It was news 
to him, indeed, and good news. It 
inspired evidently and vividly every 
part of his life. 

1775. Love, Not Occasional. — What 
is the command of God in respect to 
love ? Is it to be an occasional im- 
pulse ? Are we, when the Sabbath 
day comes, to take out our heart, and 
select from it love as an arrow, and 
let it fly at the target in the sanctuary, 
and say, " There, my shaft has sped ; 
I have done my duty to-day ; " or is 
it to be the continual experience of 
our life ? Is it to be an impulse pro- 
voked by occasion and necessity ; or 
is it to be an abiding state lying be- 
hind all the activities of our nature, 
propelling and directing them ? It is 
to be the chief element of life. 

1776. Christianity without Love. — 
What an ear of corn is without the 
grain, that Christianity is without 
kind, genial, sympathetic love, — cob 
and husk. When the corn is growing, 
the cob serves a good purpose as a 
center for the grain to form itself 
upon, and the husk is a grand wrap- 
per for protecting it from the weather 
while it is yet tender. I do not, there- 
fore, speak against the cob or the 
husk. I regard them as important in- 
side and outside influences, provided 
for the ripening of the corn. Churches, 
and means of grace, and religious in- 
stitutions, which do not produce love, 
are mere cob and husk. True Chris- 
tian love is the grain. 



1777. Interpreting God's Will. — 
God locks up his best blessings, but 
gives to every man a key wherewith 
to open the lock. One man takes his 
key, and goes up to the lock, and tries 
to unlock it ; but his key will not fit ; 
it will not go in, because it is Pride 
that he has been trying to unlock 
with. Another man says, " Let me 
try my key." He takes Vanity; but 
he finds that vanity will not unlock 
the door. Another man comes up 
with the key of willful Selfishness. 
His key is three times as big as the 
keyhole and he can't get in. They 
all fail to unlock the door, and go 
away. By and by another man 
comes. He puts his key to the lock ; 
it shdes in ; there is not a ward that it 
does not touch ; the bolt slides back 
without a sound, and the door swings 
open. He knows the secret. He 
comes in the spirit of Love, obedience, 
and resignation, and to him God's will 
is revealed. 

1778. Unselfish Heroism. — John 
Brown felt that his whole life was 
good for nothing except as an offering 
to others. He went to death as men 
go to a banquet, and as he was led 
forth to the sacrifice he kissed a little 
child. 

1779. Coming Triumph of Meek- 
ness. — Behold the barren field. 
Everything sleeps or is dead. Call, 
now, to the winds in January, to the 
sheeting snows in February, to re- 
deem the field and the forest; but 
what change can violence work upon 
the dead field and the forest.? Yet 
there is a prophecy of silence in the 
south, and there are winds that wan- 
der, run before the coming sun. Now 
the morning comes earlier and the 
evening lingers later. Now milder 
heavens ; now come birds, singing 
victory ; more light, longer days, 
gentler heat, and, behold, death is 



378 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



slain and June is here, and in her hip 
all falls. And so shall be the advanc- 
ing forces of love and meekness. 

1780. Love and Hatred. — When 
the bow of all colors spans itself 
across the back of the storm-cloud, 
the contrast between the blackness 
and the radiant bow is not more beau- 
tiful than the contrast between the 
disposition that smiles and loves and 
prays, over against the bitter storm of 
depravity in the heart that hates and 
spitefully mistreats. 

1 78 1. Spontaneity of Christian 
Kindness. — The mother fills the whole 
day with faithfully serving the child ; 
and yet, if one calls in the evening, 
and says, " What a wonderful woman 
you are ! how you have all day long 
denied yourself to serve that little 
child ! " she says, " No ; I have done 
nothing of the kind." The impression 
has not been left upon her mind that 
she has done something operose. She 
has done all so easily and naturally 
that it does not occur to her that she 
has done anything. Yet she is a per- 
fect type of true Christian kindness — 
of kindness reduced to a law, to a ne- 
cessity, to a spontaneity, by which it 
emits itself continuously and uncon- 
sciously. 

1782. The Pattern of Perfection. — 
That which makes a man Christlike is 
not the fact that he is doing so much 
for himself, that he is building himself 
up in various right things, and ridding 
himself of various wrong things : it is 
that he is perfect, as his Father in 
heaven is, who makes his sun to shine 
on the good and on the bad, and who 
sends his rain on the just and on the 
unjust. Disinterested love, disinter- 
ested goodness — that is the pattern. 

1783. The Motherhood Ideal. — The 
word of God says, " In honor prefer- 
ring one another." Does anybody 
really do this? Yes! I should like 



to know if the mother, when she sits 
down to the table with her children, 
picks out the best things, and eats 
them, and gives the children what is 
left. Does not she in love prefer every 
child ? And, going down, she is more 
attentive to the youngest than to those 
that are older ; the little babe in the 
cradle rules the whole of them. Her 
sensibility and kindness increase in 
the ratio of their need. And, that 
which the mother feels is the type of 
universal motherhood, or the true 
Christian feeling ripened in human 
nature. 

1784. As Little Children. — You can 
scarcely conceive of any affection on 
earth that is more pure, more divested 
of selfishness, and more entirely a 
sentiment, and a noble sentiment, 
than that which an intelligent child, 
growing up into man's estate, has for 
his father and his mother. And I 
apprehend that the love which the 
soul has for Christ comes nearer to 
this than we imagine, and that there 
is more meaning than lies upon the 
surface of it when we are told that we 
must become as little children, and 
that unless we become like them, and 
love God as they love their parents, 
we cannot enter the kingdom of 
heaven. 

1785. Forget Your Own Good 
Deeds. — Fill the world full of all the 
effects of your wisdom, your zeal, 
your goodness, your activity, your 
power ; but do not worship yourself 
in the meager line of your past deeds. 
If it is a mean thing for a man to 
think too much of himself when he is 
at the very citadel and center of his 
affairs, how much baser it is for a 
man to sit down and worship his own 
shadow ! Never count what you have 
done for your friends. 

1786. Selfishness and Love in Con- 
flict. — There are two great currents 



UNSELFISH LOVE 



379 



flowing through this world ; and the 
point of contact is the point of con- 
fusion and turmoil. Where two great 
winds meet and whirl, there is almost 
indescribable confusion ; and so, where 
two great streams of influence meet, 
there the battle is joined. From be- 
neath, from the great mass of initial 
life below, the law of selfishness pre- 
vails ; and everywhere, all the way on 
and up, the law of God laid on it is, 
"Take care of thyself." From the 
other direction, from the very fount 
and source of all wisdom and all 
power, comes another stream — " Suf- 
fer, instead of others suffering ; look 
not on thine own things, but on the 
things of others." The law of selfish- 
ness with which creation begins at the 
bottom is met by the law of self-sacri- 
fice and love which comes in from 
above ; and where they come in con- 
flict there is whirl and turmoil. 

1787. Necessity of Loving. — Great 
souls have bled to death because they 
did not know where to bestow the 
precious gift of love. One may be 
conscious of being worthy to be loved, 
and still more conscious of having 
wonderful stores of love to pour forth, 
and yet be starved all the while. 
This capacity — necessity I had almost 
called it — of loving, this hero-worship 
of the heart, this enthusiasm of love, 
is among the most noble elements 
there are in human nature. God 
made man so. There is many a 
dusky heathen who has had the same 
impulse. I do not doubt that many a 
stone idol has been loved as only God 
should be, and that many a poor 
ignorant soul has tlirown itself like a 
handful of diamonds against the brute 
idol, which is all it has, all it could 
have, to love. But do you think God 
will destroy such a soul because it 
does not know any better? Not I. I 
am not an infidel. 



1788. Persistence of Love. — There 
be some plants which, once started, 
strike tlieir roots underground in every 
direction so speedily that you cannot 
eradicate them ; and they will creep 
under fences, and spread behind 
stones, and sprawl over the walk, and 
pervade the whole garden. And there 
be many souls whose love, once 
rooted, cannot be taken back. The 
man of a wedded pair may grow 
worse, and at last may even feel that 
that love is an irksome thing, inodor- 
ous balsam itself, to him ; and his life 
is one of repulsion ; and from pride and 
selfishness he goes down to passions, 
lusts, debauchery and drunkenness, 
and leaves behind him all honor, all 
trust, all goodness, all respect — goes 
down to the very door of the grave ; 
but the heart which broke itself upon 
him, and poured its treasure into his 
unworthy heart, never leaves him nor 
forsakes him. It is the one solitary 
mourner when lie sinks into death, 
and when men breathe freer and say, 
"Thank God, that curse is gone," 
Great is the power of love. 

1789. Enthusiasm of Love. — If 
there be one pathetic thing in this 
world it is the affection of a noble 
dog. I had almost said that the most 
disinterested love we know of is that 
of a dog, which asks for nothing but 
the privilege of loving to excess. 
Beaten and starved, who can be half 
so glad as that dog is when his master 
returns ? Such love almost makes one 
weep at the thought that the dog can- 
not speak. Even this brute animal 
has the rudimentary form of that en- 
thusiasm of love of which Paul fur- 
nishes one of the most magnificent 
examples. This feeling, then, which 
takes so grand a form towards Jesus 
Christ, is latent in human nature ; 
and the soul's structure is such that 
one may lose selfishness and all sordid 



o 



80 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



self-seeking, aiul taking, as it were, 
the noble essence of man, lavish it on 
Jesus as the alabaster box of sweet 
ointment was broken and poured upon 
his head. 

1790. Learning God's Nature. — We 
count nothing too good to sacrifice for 
a friend. You do not love, unless you 
arc willing to suffer for what you love ; 
and the depth of your love is in pro- 
portion to what you are willing to suf- 
fer. A person gives himself up to 
some faithful labor of love in behalf 
of a friend, and while engaged therein, 
there comes to him a conception of 
what is the nature of that God who 
gives himself, in heaven, on earth, 
through time, and through eternity, 
an everlasting and willing sufferer for 
all. Here rises before him an illustra- 
tion of the teachings of the Gospel. 

1791. The One Thing Needful. — 
There is but one thing required of 
man, and that is, that he shall have 
love. If you take care of that, every- 
thing else will take care of itself. 
There are other feelings and attributes 
essential to the soul, but these neces- 
sarily exist and act where there is 
love. As in a watch there is a spring, 
which, if you coil it up, will of itself 
keep all the wheels in motion, so there 
is in the human soul a spring vv'hich, 
if you wind it up, will uncoil itself, 
and carry forward everything related to 
your duties and conduct in this world. 

1792. Unconscious Beauty of the 
Christ-Spirit. — Look at the magnolias 
that stretch forth great flowering 
branches, that are so generous and so 
full of kind thoughts that they cannot 
wait for their leaves to grow before 
they express them. They have a uni- 
versal graciousness that from its very 
nature comes forth to give joy to those 
within its reach. 

Men who are filled with Christ, 
who have sympathy with Divine be- 



neficence, although at times they may 
apply their force to good and peace, 
yet, whether they think of it or not, 
unavoidably carry themselves as ben- 
efactions, just as blossoms unavoid- 
ably carry fragrance, by reason of 
their constituent nature. 

1793. Loving-Kindness. — There 
should be an abiding disposition of 
benevolence out of which should 
spring incessant acts of kindness. 
When the waters of an inexhaustible 
spring have been conveyed through 
pipes to your dweUing, it needs only 
that you should open the vent, and it 
will gush forth with power and copi- 
ousness by its own native force. Even 
when it is not flowing, it is pressing 
and urging itself, and longing to flow. 
Left to itself, night and day it would 
gush. It must be hindered, it must 
be stopped, but it needs never to be 
solicited. There is a well-spring of 
love which God sinks in the human 
soul, which throbs without ceasing, 
and strives to give itself forth. The 
kindness is always there, ready and 
waiting. Only opportunity is needed. 

1794. Love, from Within. — Jesus 
laid down the fundamental principle 
that love must spring forth, not from 
the admirableness of any object of re- 
gard, but from the richness of one's 
own nature in true benevolence. Like 
the sun, love sends forth from itself 
that color which makes beautiful 
whatever it shines upon ; therefore 
love your enemies, bless them that 
curse you, do good to them that hate 
you, and pray for them that despite- 
fuUy use you. 

1795. Without Love. — Suppose 
Gilmore's band of three hundred mu- 
sicians were leading a procession 
through Broadway, and suppose they 
left out the trumpets, the hautboys, 
the bassoons, the trombones, and 
went clashing through the street, the 



UNSELFISH LOVE 



381 



whole three hundred of them, with 
cymbals, what sort of music would 
they make ? What such music would 
be, that would be learning and refine- 
ment and intellectual treasure without 
love. The best part is left out when 
love is left out, and these other things 
go clashing, clashing, clashing on. 

1796. Man-Hater Cannot be God- 
Lover, — The Scripture is very plain ; 
its sentences are like arrows ; there 
are no apologies in it ; and any man 
that says he loves God because he has 
ecstatic visions, poetic dreams, and all 
manner of venerations, because his 
soul is inflamed, while yet there 
rankles in him, in any shape, the 
damnable serpent of hatred, is mis- 
taken ; and God says to him, without 
stopping to apologize, "You are a 
liar!" 

1797. Returning Good for Evil. — 
To perform acts of kindness and gen- 
erosity towards men for the sake of 
heaping fire on their head, is to per- 
vert the whole spirit of this passage ; 
that is a case in which obedience 
would be the rankest disobedience : 
but where on the altar the fire is kin- 
dled, and the incense is thrown upon 
it, and the offering is made and con- 
sumed, the coals mean something 
very different from what they would 
were they employed by a tormentor 
or a persecutor. You consume, as it 
were, upon the very altar of his head, 
by your kindness, the offences which 
he has committed. It is the fire of 
kindness that consumes the sin and 
the offence. 

1798. Christ for Man, not Institu- 
tions. — Christ took the part of religion 
against religious institutions ; of reli- 



gious feeling against religious usages, 
which are often venerable in propor- 
tion as they are nothing else. God's 
law of love, which the Jews had made 
stone, was smitten by Christ, and 
made to gush with water for the poor 
that lay athirst and gasping in the dust. 

1799. Conscience and Love. — He 
who is right by the force of con- 
science is never so happy as he who 
is right by the force of love ; for con- 
science is a hard master, and carries 
a straight rule. The more acute your 
conscience is to inspire you to duty, 
the more it torments you when you 
violate your duty. Conscience is a 
despot. It almost never smiles ; it 
sits and scowls ; and its business is to 
flagellate rather than reward. But 
love suffereth long, and is kind ; love 
envieth not ; love vaunteth not itself, 
is not puffed up, doth not behave 
itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, 
is not easily provoked, thinketh no 
evil. Love, transcendent, shall abide 
when doctrines, and ordinances, and 
churches, and governments shall have 
passed away — when nothing else shall 
remain but the other supreme moral 
sentiments of the soul — faith and 
hope. Love, even in that hour, high 
above either of these, and above all 
other things, high above them as the 
spire of a cathedral is above the roof 
or the foundations — shall exist ; for it 
is God ; and is yet to be God over all, 
blessed — because blessing — forever 
and forever. 

1800. Love Supreme. — " Now abide 
Faith, Hope, Love, these three ; but 
the greatest of these is Love," for 
love is the seraph, and faith and hope 
are but the wings by which it flies. 



382 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



XXXI. PRATER 



1801. The Nature of Prayer. — In 
its simplest enunciation, prayer is 
some act by which a human mind 
comes into communion with God. It 
is sunning some thought or feehng in 
the light of God's face. It is a 
recognition of God's presence. 

1802. God, and Prayer. — You 
looked out of the window and saw 
the whole httle history ; but when the 
children come in to tell the tale of 
joy, you assume that you know noth- 
ing about it. Why ? Because you 
want to hear it from their lips. You 
say, "What is it?" though you 
know as well as they do. You enjoy 
hearing them rehearse it. 

God knows all ; but he loves to 
hear his children talk to him. 

1803. Object of Prayer. — Prayers 
are instruments by which gracious 
results are wrought out. Just so far 
as they tend to bring us consciously 
into the presence of God they are bene- 
ficial ; and in proportion as they fail 
to do it they are of no use whatever. 

Suppose one, under the influence of 
superstition, should repeat five times 
the Lord's Prayer, and five times the 
Creed and Confession of Faith, morn- 
ing, noon and night, without, either 
morning, or noon or night, having a 
single thought excited by them ? He 
might as well use the Multiplication 
table. The mere fact that these are 
prayers gives them no sort of validity. 
You may take the most sacred truths 
or the most exquisite utterances of 
prayer, and repeat them, and if they 
do nothing to you, if they do not lift 
your thoughts heavenward, if they do 
not touch any sympathy in you, if 
they do not bring you into sweet com- 
munion with God, they are utterly 
vapid and useless. This was the 
teaching of our Savour. 



1804. Our Father, Which Art in 
Heaven. — No man who is merely 
reverential can pray this prayer. 
Bow down the head till it touches 
the ground ; let the heart be weiglied 
down with awe and veneration, — that 
does not enable the lip to speak the 
word aright. It is not what breaks 
us down before God that fits us to go 
into his presence. It is that which 
lifts us up towards him. It is our 
yearning for him, our realization of 
his true paternity, our filial afTection 
for him. 

1805. Aspiration of Prayer. — Oh, 
how beautiful becomes that life which 
is evermore tending upward ! 

First, in the morning, when the old 
New England fire was kindled, a 
simple spark was put in the shavings ; 
then the wood was piled on ; and 
then, little by little, up through the 
whole rolled the blue smoke ; and by 
and by were seen coming forth arrows 
of flame ; and, as the pile began more 
and more to be caught, how every 
flash shot upward ! How everything 
in that fire tended heavenward ! And 
whenever a stick broke and fell down, 
what myriad sparks rushed up to 
dazzle the eye of the imaginative 
child! 

It should be just so with the altar- 
fire of the heart. When first kindled, 
in the midst of fears and doubts, the 
smoke may roll upward ; but the mo- 
ment the life has caught, and it is 
once aglow, then every little thought 
and every little feeling should leap 
upward, and the whole soul should 
bound Godward. Thus you will 
come to fulfill, not so much the covi- 
mand, as the sweet exhortation, of the 
apostle, " Pray without ceasing." 

1806. Varied Elements of Prayer. 
— In any comprehensive Christian ex- 



PRAYER 



383 



perience that utters itself in prayer, 
you will find that confession, supplica- 
tion, communion, thanksgiving, and 
praise come and go and blend to form 
the great whole, as do the tones of 
different instruments in a well-chorded 
orchestra. 

1807. Silent Prayer. — Grant thy 
blessing upon thy people, this morn- 
ing, assembled here. Though their 
lips be silent, what clouds of incense 
from every heart go up in petitions to 
thee ! 

1808. Prayer a Relief. — I pray on 
the principle that the wine knocks the 
cork out of a bottle. There is an in- 
ward fermentation, and there must be 
a vent. The soul prays first ; the 
tongue may, afterwards. 

1809. Life Interpreting God through 
Prayer. — It is by having in me feelings 
representing the Divine nature, that I 
know something of what are the flood- 
tides and ocean-depths of that nature. 
And I think almost every Christian 
will say that Christ did not come to 
him in the closet, but that as, per- 
haps, he was walking, like the apostles 
who went to Emmaus, about his busi- 
ness, or fulfilling some duty without 
thought of remuneration, Christ came 
and caused to burst upon him such a 
vision and sense of God as was never 
gained in reading, or in any act of 
prayer. 

I do not put discredit upon reading 
or prayer, but I say this : that they 
put into us the material — they lay the 
train — which practical experience 
strikes fire into, and flashes in. They 
put into us material that manifests it- 
self when life interprets it. If we 
keep the commands of Christ he will 
manifest himself to us. 

1810. Prayer Spiritual not Material. 
— A father hears that his child has 
prayed that God would give him a 
sled ; and in order to confirm the 



child's trust in God he buys a sled, 
and slyly puts it in the child's room 
the next day, and so cheats the child 
into a lie, teaching him to believe that 
he can pray for sleds, and have his 
prayers answered. 

But men have found out that in all 
spheres except the spiritual God acts 
only generically, leaving germ-forms, 
primitive organizations, to work out 
their own functions under human 
volitions. And even spiritual effects 
are wrought out through natural — 
that is, God-ordained — principles. 

181 1. The Prayer-Meeting. — Goto 
the plantation, and see those poor 
children of darkness (dark both ways, 
outside and in) gathered together, and 
singing hymns which are a mixture of 
heathen mythology and Scripture ; 
see them spring into the air with wild 
outcry and fantastic gestures. There 
are a thousand things to be pruned and 
corrected in their mode of worship- 
ing ; but 1 think there is something 
worse than their rude manifestations. 

Go, now, with me into that stately 
room where there are thirty or forty 
or fifty people. Each one picks out a 
whole pew, and sits down in it. And 
each one is perfectly proper. Nobody 
speaks to anybody. And when the 
choir sing, three or four of the con- 
gregation manage to join in the sing- 
ing. And one gets up to speak, and 
says just what he said thirty or forty 
years ago, and what he has repeated 
about once a week ever since. And 
when he takes his seat another gets 
up and goes through a stereotyped 
speech. And when he is done an- 
other gets up, and perhaps reproves 
them both. And when he sits down 
one or two prayers are uttered — pray- 
ers that have taken root in the mem- 
ory, and that are repeated for the 
thousandth time ! And that is called 
a meeting. There has been no inde- 



384 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



coriim, no impropriety, not a single 
exceptional thing, except this, that 
they were a set of corpses making be- 
Heve that they were alive. And I 
say that the wildest dance of ex-slaves 
in the woods is better than such a 
meeting ! Life is the first element of 
everything that is proper or in good 
taste. If you must give up either 
order and regularity or high feeling, 
give up the order and regularity. 

1812. Forms of Prayer. — The ques- 
tion as to the wisdom of formulated 
prayer is involved ; and about that I 
have only to say, that they who find 
that they can pray better out of the 
Book have God's dear leave to pray 
out of the Book. That road in which 
your feet ascend easiest and fastest 
towards the heavenly gate is your 
road ; and you need no priest, no 
minister, no authority, to tell you to 
walk in it. If you can pray more to 
edification by the formulated prayers 
of the Church than by extemporane- 
ous prayers, so pray. But it is not for 
you to turn upon me and say that ex- 
temporaneous prayers are unedifying. 
You have a right to say that they do 
not edify you, but not to say that they 
do not edify me and other people. 

1813. Short and Long Prayers. — 
A navigator has been running without 
an observation for days and nights, 
he is whelmed in darkness, he fears 
he is going on to a dangerous shore, 
and he is in great distress. But by 
and by the wind shifts, and the clouds 
which have so long covered the heav- 
ens begin to break, and the man runs 
and gets his instrument, and a cloud 
lifts for a single moment, and out 
shines a familiar star, and he catches 
a glimpse of it, and down shuts the 
cloud again. " Ah ! " he says, "shut, 
if you want to, I've got all I want." 
He has borrowed from the regular 
movements of the divine clockwork 



what he needs for his reckoning, and 
it did not take him more than a min- 
ute. And he says, " Now I know 
just where we are." Was not that 
minute's work as good as if he had 
been an hour about it? 

Now, a man who prays, and who, 
praying, feels the heart of God ; who 
feels that his soul, like a quick bird 
that darts from the forest-shade into 
the sunlight, is, by thought or feeling, 
lifted into the presence of God, into 
the influences of the eternal world, 
into the heavenly state, has got an 
impulse, and has obtained the desired 
object. I do not say that if he could 
abide there it would be wrong. I do 
not say that he is forbidden to range 
there if he can range. But this being 
sorry because one cannot pray long, 
when a short prayer answers every 
purpose, is absurd. Prayer is not to 
be measured by the yard. It is a 
thing of quality, not of quantity. 

1814. "Continuing Instant in 
Prayer," — This means, not going 
down on your knees all the time, not 
praying by the clock, but being in the 
spirit of communion with God, and 
pouring your thoughts, as if you had 
a companion close by you, into his 
bosom continually. 

1815. " Without Ceasing.'' — In re- 
gard to the moral sentiments and the 
affections, men know that by educa- 
tion certain parts of the mind learn to 
diffuse their influence gently, and al- 
most continuously, through the experi- 
ence of life. We live habitually under 
the influence, direct or indirect, of 
certain of our feelings. And to " pray 
without ceasing" means, not that we 
are literally to iterate and reiterate 
without cessation the words of prayer, 
but that we are to give to this praying 
tendency of the mind the education 
that we give to taste, to kindness, to 
conscientiousness and to understand- 



PRAYER 



385 



\ng. We are to make it not an occa- 
sional but a uniform tendency, so that 
even when we are not praying by di- 
rect voHtion there will be a latent im- 
pulse towards converse with God, felt 
through all the soul. 

1816. Prayer to be Spontaneous. — 
One is asked, " Did you say your 
prayers to-day ? " " No ; I did not ! " 
" Great pity ! You ought to have 
done it." Why ought he? Do you 
suppose I am bound to talk to my God 
when I do not feel like it? Do you 
suppose I am under a service more 
exacting in my relations to my 
heavenly Father than a child is in his 
relations to his earthly parent, or than 
a friend is in his relations to a friend ? 
If I am not in a mood to talk to you, 
you do not lose confidence in me. If 
I am in a mood to be taciturn, you do 
not blame me. And if I am not in a 
mood to talk with God, he understands 
that mood. 

Pray, if you feel Hke it ; and keep 
silent if you do not. Do not 7na/;£ 
believe in the matter of praying. 

1817. The Prayer of Duty .—A child 
is fractious, and has done wrong, and 
is soundly whipped ; and when it has 
cried its cry, and it is time for it to 
make up, the mother says, " Now 
come and kiss me." The child hesi- 
tates, and draws back, and the mother 
says, " You must, or I shall whip you 
again." And rather than be whipped 
again, the child, all tears, and pout- 
ing, comes up and kisses the mother. 
How much is such a kiss as that 
worth ? 

There are many persons, it seems 
to me, who have this feeling about 
prayer : " If I am a Christian, I must 
perform Christian duties; and prayer 
is one of them." And they pray be- 
cause they feel that they must. 

1818. Prayer in Emergency. — May 
a man that is not wont to pray, in 



sudden danger cry out to God ? Why 
not? May a man pray who is a sin- 
ner? Why not? I ask you, are you 
better than God ? And yet, suppose 
a man be lazy ; suppose, by his own 
fault, he has come to famine, and, 
pale and fainting, he falls upon your 
doorstep, and, with the last strength 
he has, he says: "A morsel of 
bread! For God's sake! a morsel 
of bread!" Will you say to him: 
"Why did you not work?" Will 
you read to him a lesson on economy, 
and quote to him that passage of 
Scripture which declares that the man 
who will not work shall not eat ? You 
will feed him first. 

i8ig. Prayer under Pressure. — It is 
very blessed that men should be 
moved to pray in emergencies of af- 
fliction or peril ; that is better than 
nothing : but oh ! how poor is prayer 
where men are driven to it by the 
whip, and where they resort to it only 
when they feel the lash of trouble and 
affliction upon their backs ! What 
would you think of a son that never 
went home to his father except when 
he was in debt, and had the sheriff" at 
his heels, and wanted help ; and who, 
the moment he obtained the relief 
which he sought, forgot that father 
again, and cared nothing for him ? It 
is better for a child to go to his par- 
ents, even when he is by his wicked- 
ness driven to them, than to avoid 
them in his emergency; but how little 
has he the education of a true son if 
he goes only then ! 

1820. Delayed Answer to Prayer. — 
If God's chastisements make you bet- 
ter, thank God for them. Those un- 
feeling words, that cold look, and that 
indifferent way of Christ [to the Syro- 
Phenician woman] — what a gush of 
feeling they brought out from this 
woman's soul! That pushing away 
— how it brought the pleading hands 



386 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



out, as it were ! How it caused every 
tendril and fiber of her heart to clasp 
and cling to the Saviour, and made 
her refuse to let him go ! It was out 
of the apparent winter of his face that 
her summer came. . . . Do not feel 
when God is dealing with you severely 
that he has forgotten you. It takes a 
great while to answer some prayers. 

1821. Patient Waiting. — Is your 
child vagrant ? Pray for him ; work 
for him, and then wait. Afar off may 
be the turning, and yet it may be 
there. Ere long you shall see it, 
though your eyes do not behold it 
now. Time is in God's hands, and he 
stretches it out wide, and we think 
that he has forgotten us. Wait upon 
the Lord. Trust him. 

1822. Importunate Prayer. — Bow 
down before him and plead. Do not 
be put away by his silence. The 
wonderful silence of God, if you only 
knew it, is full of promise and bless- 
ing. Yea, though he frown upon you 
and rebuke you, and things seem to 
grow worse and worse, hold on, and 
by and by he shall say, " O woman ! 
be it unto thee even as thou wilt." 
From such instances as these we get 
wine. These are precious clusters. 
We press them, and get from them 
juice, which we keep from day today, 
to revive our hope. 

1823. Prayer, a Universal Recourse. 
— Do not think that you are the only 
men that pray. Drunkards pray. 
There is not a man here who has put 
up such anguishful petitions to God as 
some men have who are very bad in 
the sight of the world. Do you sup- 
pose that men who are bad go down 
without prickings of conscience, and 
without many yearnings for the 
interposition of God's power? I tell 
you, the struggles of men who are 
going down to death are often a 
thousand times more admirable in the 



sight of God than the easy efforts of 
men naturally born to virtue. 

1824. The Prayer of the Wicked.— 
Is not " the sacrifice of the wicked an 
abomination to the Lord" ? Yes, if a 
man tries to garnish his wickedness by 
sacrifice, and thinks that after sacrifice 
he may go on with plenary indulgence 
again. But to interpet it so that a 
man may not pray until he is con- 
verted, is to shut out the universe. 
May not my son, who little by little 
has been weakened and through years 
of degradation has separated himself 
from me until sickness overtakes 
him — when then in his wretchedness 
he has fevered dreams of his home, 
may he not call out " O, my father! " 
may he not invoke his mother until he 
has been restored to health, and to his 
right mind ? 

1825. Moral Disability. — I believe 
that the bitterest prayers which ever 
go to heaven, are prayers of poor 
drunkards, in their intervals of re- 
morse for the past, and longing for the 
future. Why, then, do they not break 
away from the cup? Because the 
power of choice is destroyed in them, 
almost, — quite, in some instances. 
For drunkenness becomes a disease 
for which a man is totally irresponsi- 
ble after a while. He has broken 
down the very mainspring of char- 
acter. And in such stages as this he 
should be treated just as the insane 
are treated. He should be put into an 
asylum. He should be dealt with as 
we deal with little children, and those 
who cannot take care of themselves. 

1826. The Cry of the Penitent. — 
Wherever there is a man conscious 
that he has done wrong again and 
again and again, and that in his own 
strength he can never stand, and that 
he needs help, he has a right to ask 
for it. "I am lost in sin ; I have no 
strength to rescue myself ; thou art 



PRAYER 



387 



God; save mc ! "— that is an argu- 
ment which knocks louder at the 
bosom of God than any battle-ax at 
the gate of any castle on earth. 

1827. Prayer and Self-help. — Pray 
that God will restrain your wrong 
tendencies ; but take care, when you 
pray, that you help yourself. The re- 
sponsibility is on you. 

If I have bought a pair of fiery 
horses, and I sit behind them to make 
my experimental ride, I do not think 
it unmanly to commit my soul to God 
and ask him to protect me ; but I do 
not throw the reins down on the dash- 
board and trust to Providence alone. 
I pray, to be sure ; but I watch my 
horses all the time. I drive with all 
the care that is possible ; driving for 
everybody on the road, as every good 
driver does, as well as for myself. As 
every man knows what his weakness is, 
whether it be pride, or selfishness, or 
anger, or any other of these besetting 
sins, he should in prayer ask for pro- 
tection ; but prayer will not secure 
that blessing to him except through 
his own exertions. He must be waked 
up to will and to do of God's good 
pleasure. 

1828. Resisting Answers to Prayer. 
— A sick child wants to get well ; but 
when he tastes the bitter medicine he 
does not want to take that. A slug- 
gard longs for riches, but he does not 
want industry. An intemperate man 
wants to be temperate, but he cannot 
give up the cup. And so men, in 
prayer, from day to day, are asking 
God for that which, when he is dis- 
posed to give it, they resist, and put 
away, and do not want. 

1829. Watch and Pray. — What are 
these two elements that are joined ? 
Prayer stands comprehensively for 
spiritual force — the invisible power 
which God wields in the affairs of men 
and of the world. WatcJiitig iizsid^^ for 



human power, or that knowledge and 
control of visible forces which are 
within the purview of man. And 
these two are joined together in every 
office, spiritual and temporal, of life. 
The human and the divine together 
minister success. You should pray 
for the things which you are to work 
out yourself; and you should yourself 
work out the things for which you pray. 

1830. Casting Care on God. — I 
think men do with their cares as sol- 
diers do with their accoutrements, 
when they go to dinner. They stack 
them up, and leave them till they 
have finished their meal, and then 
each fellow goes back and takes up 
his knapsack, and puts it on, and 
takes up his old musket, and shoulders 
that, and walks off as much burdened 
as before. We go into our closets 
and pray about our children till we 
think we have laid them down before 
God, and then we turn and take them 
up again and walk off with them. 
We pray in our closets about this and 
that trouble, and go out feeling that 
we have laid them down before God ; 
but in less than five minutes back to 
us they come again. We should ask 
God to help our efforts, but our care 
we should cast upon him. 

1831. Prayer for Others. — If one of 
your children should come to you beg- 
ging for fruit, or for some article for 
his own personal gratification, you 
might be disposed to grant it to him ; 
but suppose one of them should come 
to you and plead in behalf of another 
child, and tell what his troubles were, 
explaining why he ought to be in- 
dulged, would not the generosity of 
the child open your heart ? Would 
you not feel a double obligation to 
grant the request, first because the 
thing was proper for the child, and 
second because it pleased you to have 
this disinterested importunity .'' When 



388 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



we come before God he loves, without 
doubt, to hear us plead for our own 
wants ; but when we plead for others 
there is in it an element of mag- 
nanimity and grace which God, it 
seems to me, must love and be more 
inclined to favor than petitions in our 
own behalf. 

1832, Divine Willingness to Help. 
— The oftener you go to God for help, 
the more welcome you are. When a 
man comes to you for counsel, it not 
only does not impoverish you to give 
him the benefit of your knowledge and 
wisdom, but you are gratified at his 
consulting you, and you take pleasure 
in lending yourself to him. I cannot 



conceive of a man who, having a 
store of discreet knowledge should be 
unwilling to use it for the succor of 
his fellow-men. If ducats were as 
plenty with me as thoughts, I should 
be most happy to lend to everybody. 

1833. Thoughts and Feelings are 
Prayers. — It is not necessary for me 
to go to God as I would to a man, or 
as I would address a human being 
through the post, writing a letter and 
putting on it name, street and number. 
I am open before him. He knows me 
through and through. He reads my 
very thoughts and feelings, and all 
my desires that are upward and right 
and noble are prayers. 



XXXII. THE BIBLE 



1834. Right Use of the Bible.— The 
Bible is like a telescope. If a man 
looks through his telescope, then he 
sees worlds beyond ; but if he looks 
at his telescope, then he does not see 
anything but that. The Bible is a 
thing to be looked through, to see that 
which is beyond ; but most people 
only look at it ; and so they see only 
the dead letter. 

1835. Inspiration. — It is the grow- 
ing human race that has been inspired; 
and the Bible in every part of it was 
lived first, and the record of it made 
afterwards. As a great poet never 
originates, but only throws into mas- 
terful forms the sum of all the thoughts 
and feelings that exist down to his 
time ; as Shakespeare did not create 
his characters, but saw them, and with 
genius had the power to gather them 
into groups and unfold them — not as 
anything that was new, but as that 
which was existing, though incoherent, 
dispersed, inorganic ; so the race itself 
was inspired to growth, and lived until 
some results of experience had become 
widespread and vaguely recognized. 



The time came when a man of large 
nature, feeling more sensitively the in- 
spiration of the Divine nature, was 
able to gather, to fix, and give out as 
truth, these unorganized elements — 
never perhaps before put into written 
form. 

1836. Essential Quality of the Bible. 
— The true Bible is not the dead book, 
but the living reality, developed by 
the spirit of God in the conscience of 
mankind. It is not a printed thing. 
The printed thing is the memorial of 
it, a souvenir of it, a mere chart ; and 
the chart is not the ocean. 

1837. The Bible a Growth. — If the 
race were to step upon the earth as 
our children do into a school, the 
Bible would have been made for them, 
and the first man would have had it 
as well as the last. We find it already 
written, and waiting for us, but the 
first generation found not a line. 
They found only the world into which 
they were born. The race has evolved 
the Bible, not the Bible the race, ex- 
cept in later days. God educated 
men, that through them he might 



THE BIBLE 



389 



write the Bible for later days. He 
evolved the mind of man in the proc- 
ess of education, and then moved 
them to tell what he had done ; and 
that is the Bible. 

1838. The World Interprets the 
Bible. — When you see a real flower, 
you know what the Bible means when 
it says " flower." In all things that are 
cognizable by man's senses, he finds 
what is the thing spoken of in the 
Bible by going to the thing itself, out- 
side of the Bible. It is absurd to say 
that the Bible must be its own sole 
expounder. 

1839. Life an Expounder of Moral 
Truth. — Science does not depend on 
books ; it is found in the nature of 
things. Books are the means by 
which it is brought to our knowledge. 
So, moral truth does not depend on 
the Bible. The Bible does not create 
it : but merely expounds it, brings it 
into practical shapes, and makes it 
usable to men. And such is the in- 
finite wisdom and mercy of God, 
that if you should burn every Bible 
on the globe, though much knowledge 
of truth would be quenched, yet the 
world would not lose a single truth. 
For truths are organic. They spring 
from the way in which you and I are 
made, and are bred together in life. 
They belong to the nature of things. 
So that the essential truths of Chris- 
tianity will be found not merely in 
Scripture, but outside of it. They are 
not true because the Bible says they 
are ; but they are contained in the 
Bible because they are true, and were 
true before they were recorded. 

1840. The Heart makes Known the 
Book. — Dictionaries and grammars 
are like to a house-key. A key can 
unlock the outward door, but cannot 
introduce you to the people that live 
there, nor tell you what they are. 
And so, though dictionaries and gram- 



mars, and exegetical and hermeneu- 
tical helps, can introduce you into the 
books of the Bible, your own heart 
must be your teacher after that, or 
you will have none. If you have no 
depths, no wants, no joys, no sor- 
rows, with which to read, and through 
which to understand, then you cannot 
interpret this world-book. For the 
Bible is the heart-book of the world. 

1841. Antiquity of New Truths. — 
Centuries of men pass over the Scrip- 
tures, and know not what riches lie 
under the feet of their interpretation. 
Sometimes when they discover them 
they call them "new truths." You 
might as well call gold, newly dug, 
" new gold." 

1842. Mystic Interpretation Unhelp- 
ful. — What we want now is to rescue 
the Bible from the mists and fogs that 
have surrounded it, and lay it open 
before the judgment of mankind, and 
say, "Fearlessly inspect it; read it; 
think about it ! " It will stand that, 
and will be all the stronger for it. I 
am tired of a mystic interpretation of 
the Bible which takes it away from 
matter-of-fact people by wrenching 
it out of its true relations, and sub- 
stitutes clouds that have no rain in 
them for substantial realities. I am 
in favor of seeing the Word of God 
handled in the way that any other 
documents would naturally be han- 
dled, by well-ascertained laws of rea- 
son applied to interpretation. 

1843. Outside Light on the Bible. — 
When the Bible speaks of things that 
you cannot learn anything about by 
turning from passage to passage of 
Scripture, seek information concern- 
ing it elsewhere. If it speaks of silver 
you may turn to Matthew, or Revela- 
tion, or Isaiah, or any other of the 
books of the Old and New Testa- 
ments, and you will not gain as much 
light in regard to it as you will by tak- 



390 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



ing :i piece of silver ore, or a bar of 
bullion, or a dollar piece, and looking 
at that. . . . riic same is true of 
mental operations. When the attri- 
butes of the mind are spoken of in the 
Bible we ascertain what those attri- 
butes are, not by going by the Bible 
itself, but by observing their manifes- 
tations in human life. What justice, 
love, and goodness are, of which so 
much is said in the inspired record, we 
learn outside of that record. 

1844, The Book. — Once I walked 
through the old streets of London, 
where every other house has a history 
such that one might well pause before 
it, and ponder for hours. I walked 
along the fields where many a grand 
scene had been enacted. At Win- 
chester I visited the old cathedral. 
I went through it. 1 would live in 
it a month if I could. The wide in- 
terior was filled with unimagined 
beauty and glory. That cathedral 
was built in successive ages ; so that 
every part of the architecture, by the 
harmony of the varied materials of 
which it was composed, fitly repre- 
sented how all forms of religious 
thought may be harmonized in one 
great community of the true Christian 
Church. I saw the tombs of the old 
kings. Greater than they were the 
three great architects who had con- 
structed this mighty cathedral. It 
was a museum of antiquity. It was 
full of life. I trembled with sensibil- 
ity. And the impression will never 
die out of my mind. 

But what is that cathedral compared 
with this silent cathedral, the Bible, in 
whose aisles have sounded the foot- 
steps, not only of kings and emperors, 
but, from generation to generation, the 
footsteps of the httle child, and the 
mother and father of the household ; 
and the footsteps of multitudes upon 
multitudes of worthies of the church. 



all the way back, a hundred years, 
five hundred years, ten hundred 
years, fifteen hundred years ; and the 
footsteps of uncounted heroes who 
have gone up to heaven consoled and 
enlightened by the pages of the Word 
of God ! 

How venerable is this Book ! How 
full of precious memories is it ! How 
does it not only teach us the way of 
life, but group about itself the most 
significant features of history ! And 
are we, with the sciolist's ignorance, 
with unvenerating contempt, with ill- 
omened presumption, to ostracize the 
Bible, to expunge its truths, to drive 
it out of our library, and to live with- 
out its light ? 

1845. Many-Sidedness of the Bible. 
— We see streams setting from the 
Word of God, almost innumerable, of 
theories and doctrines ; and they can 
hardly all be correct, because some 
of them are mutually destructive. It 
may be said of the Bible, as it is of 
the alphabet : it is what you make it. 
With you is the combination of letters, 
and the literature is yours. 

1846. The Bible an Everyday 
Book. — It is a Book pitched to the 
key of common life, and not to an ar- 
tificial key. Many want the Bible to 
act on men as Sinai acted on the peo- 
ple at its base ; and if it did, they 
would be affected about as the Is- 
raelites were, who hearing the voice 
of the thunder and worshiping God 
one day, danced around a golden 
calf the next. You find in it scarcely 
an element which when it was written 
was not familiar to the minds of the 
common people ; it took its keynote 
from these great qualities common to 
humanity. 

1847. True Significance of the 
Bible. — Trees are ragged. Though 
they have an ideal of form, they seem 
hardly to care for it. They are nicked 



THE BIBLE 



391 



m their bark. They are knotted and 
warted. They are twisted and dis- 
torted in every way. There seems to 
be no principle in nature that cares 
much for these minor things. 

It is just the same in Scripture. Je- 
hovah seems to have gathered up the 
vital truths of each age, and recorded 
them. The grand feature of Scripture 
is its high moral element. In each 
age, purity of affections, love, justice, 
energy for good, and obedience to 
divine authority, have been the chief 
ends ; and much of human history 
that has illustrated them has been 
written out, and grouped together, and 
called The Bible. In recording these 
things there is no pedantry, no preci- 
sionism. With reference to all mere 
external forms and incidental fillings up 
there is that same magnificent appar- 
ent carelessness that there is in nature. 
We are to look for the divinity of the 
Bible, as we look for divinity in nature, 
as we look for the stars — not where 
our hands are, or our feet, but above 
our heads, in the higher region where 
man's moral sentiments dwell. It is 
there that God flames, and that his 
truths are made to be most mag- 
nificent. 

1848. Bible Reading. — A great 
many have a superstitious feeling 
about reading the Bible. Men carry 
texts as Indians carry amulets, with 
the superstitious idea that God will 
bless them to their good. The mere 
reading of the Bible, or carrying of 
texts, will not do you any good. A 
man may own a farm, and yet go to 
the poorhouse. His land must be 
cultivated, or it will do him no good. 

1849. What Readers Find in the 
Bible. — Did you ever see iron sepa- 
rated from sand by a magnet? You 
go and pick out the iron with your 
hands, guided by your eyes. It is a 
long and wearisome task, and is but 



imperfectly done at best. Now take 
tiiat magnet — that crooked piece of 
iron without an eye in its head by 
which to see — and draw it through 
and through the sand, and it will 
gather up every particle of the iron. 

Every man's predominant faculty is 
a magnet. One man's magnet is love ; 
and when he draws it through the 
Bible, every element that attaches to 
the question of love sticks to it. When 
he reads the Bible he says, "Ah! 
how anybody can read the Bible and 
not see that it is all love, I cannot un- 
derstand." His neighbor has been 
reading the same Bible, but he has 
gone through it with the magnet of 
conscience, and there is nothing but 
justice that sticks to it. He says, 
" You need not tell me about the 
kingdom of God being a kingdom of 
love ; it is a kingdom of justice, jus- 
tice, JUSTICE." And he holds every 
man responsible for exact right and 
wrong. Another man draws his mag- 
net of veneration through the Bible, 
and says, " How any man dare talk 
so familiarly of the Creator is a mys- 
tery to me! God is an awful being ! " 
It is all veneration with him. Another 
man, smiling and rejoicing, draws his 
magnet through the Bible, and out 
comes a rainbow ; out come beautiful 
flowers ; dripping clouds ; delightful 
music ; all that is bright and glorious : 
and he says, " Why, God is a God of 
beauty ! All through the Bible is 
beauty." 

And so every person takes the 
strongest faculty in himself, and 
makes a magnet of it, and goes 
through the Bible, and takes out that 
element which is in affinity with it. 

1850. Private Interpretation. — It is 
said, " If you take this dangerous 
view of individual liberty in the inter- 
pretation of the Scriptures every man 
will aspire to become a master, and 



392 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



will presume to take just what he 
chooses out of the Bible." Yes, that 
is so. That is just the way we have 
been doing about nature, and what we 
are doing to this day about all knowl- 
edge. God made the world just as it 
is. He never set up a sign, " This is 
a rock; do not let it fall on you." 
Man learned that. In regard to every- 
thing that we have actual knowledge 
of, we have come to that knowledge 
by the slow process of finding out. 
Human life has crept up the incHned 
plane, not inch by inch, but by the 
millionth of an inch, at a time. So 
too men will find and take from the 
Bible that which they need — and each 
for himself. We do it on any theory. 

1851. The Spiritual Expert.— If I 
examine a basketful of minerals from 
California, I shall know that this 
specimen has gold in it, because I see 
there little points of yellow gold ; but 
I shall not know what the white and 
the dark points are that I see. But 
let a metallurgist look at it, and he 
will see that it contains not only gold, 
but silver, and lead, and iron, and he 
will single them out. Now, the Word 
of God is filled with precious stones 
and metals, and let one instructed in 
spiritual insight go through it, and he 
will discover all these treasures ; 
while if you let a man uninstructed in 
spiritual insight go through it, he will 
discover those things that are outside 
and apparent, but those things that 
make God and man friends, and that 
have to do with the immortality of 
the soul in heaven, will escape his 
notice. 

1852. How to Read the Bible. — 
When I sit in my house, where there 
is no gale, and with no ship, and read 
my chart out of curiosity, I read it as 
you read your Bible. You steer off 
there, and say, " Here is the head- 
land of depravity." You steer along 



here, and say, " There is a lighthouse 
— born again." You steer in another 
direction, and come upon the channel 
of duty, and say, " Ah, six feet 
deep ! " And so you read the Word 
of God as at my leisure I read my 
chart. But every one of you has 
charge of a ship — the human soul. 
Evil passions are fierce winds that are 
driving it along the ways of necessity. 
This Bible is God's chart for you to 
steer by, to keep you from the bottom 
of the sea, and to show you where the 
harbor is, and how to reach it without 
running on rocks or bars. 

1853. The Bible: Reading for Cure. 
— A man who has a sharp pain in his 
side never goes to a history of medi- 
cine and reads it through. He takes 
a medical book, and hunts for a 
description of that pain, and of the 
remedy which is prescribed for it. 

Just so you ought to read the Bible. 
You should take the symptoms that 
you have, and see what the Word of 
God says about them. 

iS54- Ignorance as to God's Prom- 
ises. — Tea was first served in England 
as greens for eating. The people re- 
jected it, and thought it rather an im- 
position, as one might well suppose 
they would have done. When pota- 
toes were first introduced into Ireland, 
the inhabitants plucked the berries 
from the top of the vines, and boiled 
them, and the cultivation of potatoes 
was rejected there, because they did 
not know how to use the esculent 
roots. 

And many and many a man rejects, 
or fails to profit by, the promises of 
God's Word, because he does not 
know how to gather them and cook 
them and use them, 

1855. Searching the Scriptures. — 
As diligent bees fill their cells with 
honey unseen and unknown to others, 
so may we search thy Word, which is 



THE BIBLE 



393 



sweeter than honey in the honey- 
comb, for hidden delights. As men 
dig gold, laboring through days and 
nights, so may we search for that 
precious truth which shall give to us a 
new manhood, a nobler aspiration, a 
nearer alliance to God and more 
blessed joy. 

1856. Skimming the Bible. — I sup- 
pose no person ever did or ever will 
read the whole Bible in his life. I 
know there are persons who read it 
by letter ; I hear people say that they 
make it a rule to read the whole Bible 
through once a year. I have no 
doubt that they skate over it once a 
year; but do not think they do more 
than that, because it is not all for 
them. . . . The Bible is filled with 
ineffable riches for men ; but it be- 
longs to every man to select accord- 
ing to his need. 

1857. Blind Reading of the Bible. 
— You have walked through an oak 
forest, and you did not see in the 
trees the handles of various imple- 
ments ; you did not see in their rough 
trunks magnificent planks for side- 
boards and wainscotings ; you did not 
see in them tables and bureaus and 
bedsteads ; and yet all these things 
were in them. 

You walk through the chapters of 
the Bible, and although to one whose 
eyes are enlightened they are full of 
wondrous thoughts and economies, 
you do not see them. You have not 
formed the habit of reading the Word 
of God so as to come to that under- 
standing of its contents which comes 
by prayer, by song and by trial. 

1858. Careless Bible Reading. — As 
one that walks along a path in some 
country street or lane, morning and 
night, treads upon a thousand roots 
and chance flowers, and at the end of 
the season only remembers that there 
was a greensward, neglecting and 



scarcely discerning the single flowers, 
so one walks the shaded places of the 
Bible. They were all wayside flowers, 
and he has learned nothing except a 
cushioned path for his feet. So, 
familiarity with some of the richest 
scenes both of the Old Testament and 
of the New, takes away from them 
both their beauty and their profit to 
us ; and this is especially true in read- 
ing the life of our Saviour. 

1859. The Bible as Furniture. — A 
man goes to housekeeping, and gets a 
Bible, with his name on the inside, 
and his name on the outside, and puts 
it on the table, in his best room ; and 
there it lies for months and years with- 
out being opened — unless there is a 
funeral in the family ! Suppose I 
should go to housekeeping, and 
should give an order to the grocer for 
three boxes of sperm candles, and 
should put those candles away in the 
attic, and never light one of them ? 
That is the very figure of our Master. 
He says, " No man puts a candle 
under a bushel, but he lights it and 
puts it on a candlestick." 

i860. The Bible a Map.— The Bible 
bears precisely the same relation to 
knowledge in this matter that a well 
constructed map bears to the places 
which you wish to seek. Suppose for 
instance that there should be found in 
some crypt or old temple of Central 
America a long lost topographical 
map in which were designated the 
places where silver and gold and pre- 
cious stones were to be found, in 
mines once known to the Incas and 
princes. There is many a man who 
has gone on a fool's errand searching 
for lost treasures there, but suppose a 
map should be found revealing its 
long hidden mines or places of de- 
posit. The map would contain no 
gold or silver. You might dig in the 
map but you could not get it. But if 



394 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



you were to take that map and follow 
its directions you would come to the 
thing outside of it for which you were 
seeking. 

Now the Word of God is a chart of 
duty. You do not get the thing itself 
by merely reading. It tells you what 
to get, where to get it, and how to 
get it. 

1861. Unfound Treasures in the 
Bible. — Treasures of God's bounty are 
strewn under every hedge, and on 
either side of every fence, and many a 
man knows nothing of them. They 
come every season, wait for attention, 
and get none. There are medicinal 
roots in every field which are never 
discovered. Many a man is buried 
within a yard of plants that, if their 
healing properties had been known, 
would have saved his life, 

God's Word is like such a field. 
There are promises in it that no man 
has ever tried to find. There are 
medicines in it for the want of a 
knowledge of which hundreds have 
died. 

1862. Laws of Life Interpreted. — If 
you were to receive from an expert 
physician a line of rules or precepts — 
in respect to rising early, bathing, 
suitable clothes, proper food, the 
warmth or coldness of food, the use 
of the right kinds of food and the 
right kinds of liquids, the labor which 
it is right to engage in, the amount of 
labor to be performed, the pauses in 
labor, the various relations of the 
body to times and seasons and to oc- 
cupations — he would interpret to you 
in words that which inhered in you 
before. These rules, or precepts, or 
laws, would but express what was be- 
forehand implied in the existence and 
structure of the body. So then, a 
man may live in a world of laws 
which he does not understand, per- 
petually suffering in consequence o'' 



violations of them, because he does 
not know what they are, or how they 
operate, since they have not been in- 
terpreted to him. The laws of the 
moral and spiritual life — and even of 
the bodily life — are interpreted for us 
in the Bible, if we have eyes to see. 

1863, The Bible Indispensable. — 
The Bible essays simply to inspire and 
guide the moral centers of the mind. 
"That is narrowing the Bible, and 
bringing it within a very small com- 
pass." I beg your pardon ; it is not 
narrowing it at all. Is not the key that 
winds the clock the most important 
thing that you can bring to the clock ? 
Is not the clock helpless without it.-* It 
is a little thing, it goes into a small 
hole, and in turning it makes but little 
noise ; but, after all, it controls the 
whole economy of the clock. The 
clock is wound up by it. Now the 
Bible is the key that winds up, and 
sets in motion, and regulates all human 
life and conduct. 

1864, Test the Bible by Life,— The 
truths of the Bible must be experi- 
mentally learned. Its teachings are 
not clearly defined. The Bible is not 
like a philosophy or a poem, which is 
fully wrought out. It is to be tested 
just as a cook's recipe is, by trying li, 
and not simply by reading it, 

1865. Practice Must Supplement 
Study, — I have a chart of New York 
harbor ; and I can tell you how deep 
it is through the Romer channel, how 
deep it is through the Swash, and 
how deep it is through the Headlands, 
I learn those things from the chart ; 
but I forget them pretty quick ; and 
they do not make me a good pilot. 
The best use of the Bible is gained by 
long training in practical following of 
its teachings, 

1866. Unknown Beauties in the Bible. 
— It seems to me like some old baronial 
estate that has descended to a man 



THE BIBLE 



395 



who lives in a modern house, and 
thinks it scarcely worth while to go 
and look into the venerable mansion. 
Year after year passes away, and he 
pays no attention to it, since he has no 
suspicion of the valuable treasures it 
contains, till at last he makes up his 
mind that he will take a look at it. As 
he goes through the porch he is sur- 
prised to see the skill that has been 
displayed in its construction, and he 
says, " Indeed, they had some ideas 
of architecture when this house was 
built." And he is more and more 
impressed as he goes through the 
halls. He enters a large room, and is 
astonished as he beholds the wealth of 
pictures upon the walls, among which 
are portraits of many of his revered 
ancestors. He stands in amazement 
before them ! There is a Titian, there 
is a Raphael, there is a Corregio, and 
there is a Giorgione ! He says, " I 
never had any idea of these before." 
" Ah ! " says the steward, " there is 
many another thing that you know 
nothing about in this castle ; " and he 
takes him from room to room, and 
shows him carved plate and wonderful 
statues, and the man exclaims, " Here 
I have been for a score of years the 
owner of this estate, and have never 
before known what things were in it !" 

But no architect ever conceived of 
such an estate as God's Word, and no 
artist or carver or sculptor ever con- 
ceived of such pictures and carved 
dishes and statues as adorn its apart- 
ments. Its halls and passages cannot 
be surpassed for beauty of architec- 
ture, and it contains treasures that 
silver and gold and precious stones are 
not to be mentioned in connection with. 

1867. Inspiration of the Bible. — 
There never was, and I suppose there 
never will be, a book so directly in- 
spired of God from beginning to end. 
... It has in it everywhere the sign 



and testimony of the God that inspired 
it. As to the kind of way in which he 
inspired, I don't care a pin. When I 
smell a rose I am not anxious to have 
a chemist by to tell me exactly what 
it is that makes it smell like a rose ; it 
would not be superfl uous, but the rose is 
good enough in itself ; I smell it, and I 
have it. Yet there are many men who 
make the strength of the Bible lie in 
its outside, in its arithmetic, in its 
dates, in its various ancient statements 
which modern knowledge confutes or 
confirms ; forgetting all the while the 
grandeur of the interior, the whole 
force and power of the book as a 
medicine for the wants of men, as a 
guide to men, thoroughly furnishing 
the man of God to every good word 
and work. 

1868. Man's Regulator. — What is 
the first thing that a shipmaster does 
after he comes into port? No sooner 
has he reported to the owners, and 
delivered his papers and accounts to 
them, than he takes his chronometer, 
and goes to Bliss's chronometer shop, 
and deposits it there because he wants 
to know whether it is right ; whether 
it has gained or lost ; whether there is 
anything that ought to be done to it. 
And he leaves it there till he is ready 
to go out again, in order that when he 
starts, it may be in perfect order. 

Now, every day, you ought to take 
every part of your life into this great 
chronometer shop, the Bible, and set 
it over again, and see whether it has 
lost or gained. The word of God 
should be the text-book of every man's 
life. 

1869. The Science of Right-Living. 
—The Word of God is a chart. It 
teaches a man how to go through life 
steering right. It does not undertake 
to tell all the philosophy of what is 
right or of what is wrong, any more 
than the shipmaster understands by 



39^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



reason of his navigation all chemical 
questions and all geological questions 
which belong really to the elements 
that he deals with. It is a book that 
undertakes to tell men what is the 
science of right living. 

1870. Needless Doubt. — A state of 
doubt in respect to the Word of God 
is, in its practical consequences, just 
as fatal as unbelief. 

A man, we will suppose, is steering 
by his compass ; but the thought 
flashes across his mind, "The com- 
pass may be out of order — who 
knows?" And the moment that idea 
enters his head all his comfort is gone. 
He is steering by that tremulous 
finger ; but, after all, that tremulous 
finger may be betraying him. If he 
has but one compass he has great 
trouble ; and if he has two he is worse 
off, because he does not know which 
of them to follow. 

Men disagree about the Bible be- 
cause they are undertaking to do with 
it what it was never intended to effect. 
Everything to its own function. A 
lancet for the vein— not for digging 
the soil ; a telescope for the eye — not 
for sound ; a cap for the head — not 
for hands or feet. A table of loga- 
nthms in the sphere of morals would 
be a poor substitute for the Ten Com- 
mandments, but not worse than the 
Ten Commandments in navigation. 

. . The Bible is a book of instruc- 
tions, in respect to human life and 
destiny. It concerns itself with char- 
acter and conduct. No man need err 
who honestly uses the Bible for the 
purpose of forming his disposition or 
guiding his moral life. 

187 1, Uses of Scripture. — " But," 
it is asked, " is there not Scripture for 
it?" There is Scripture for anything 
that a man wants Scripture for. Yes, 
there is Scripture for it, just as there 
are knives in the ore of the mountain. 



You can get the ore, and you can 
make assassins' knives of it, or you 
can make plowshares of it. Scripture 
is a great forest, and you can go into 
it and cut timber and make it up into 
a great variety of utensils. You can 
make a flail out of this text ; or you 
can make a plow-handle out of it ; or 
you can build it into a cradle ; or you 
can make out of it a warrior's spear- 
handle. Scripture is the most usable 
and adaptable thing in the world. It 
is with that as it is with nature. And 
the necessity of choosing and using is 
a part of men's discipline. 

1872. The Bible Dear from Associ- 
ations. — An heir receives a great es- 
tate. In this mansion his father was 
born. There is where his father's 
father was born, and so it runs back 
eight hundred years. It is a grand 
family memorial. There are paths, 
here are the old pools for fish, here 
are gardens mathematically laid out. 
There is bower-work ; all round about 
are shady trees in which the nightin- 
gale sings. There are old oaks and 
mighty pines everywhere. Along 
comes some young member of the 
family, who doesn't like those old oak 
trees and does away with them, and 
he promptly breaks up the gardens 
and the walks, and clears everything 
away. A sense of dignity, of pro- 
priety, of art should at least have in- 
duced him to wait. Things are sacred 
by associations as well as by absolute 
qualities. On every one of those trees 
is hung some memorial of family his- 
tory. Along that path have gone feet 
that now tread the heavenly pave- 
ment. Your mother, it may be, or 
she that was your companion, may 
have trod that path. All the scenes 
are sacred. 

Hold fast, then, to the things that 
have been made sacred by association. 
Do not cast away the Word of God. 



THE BIBLE 



397 



Your Bible has been a comfort to your 
father and your mother ; has been the 
light of your earlier years ; has been 
a safe guide, — not to everything, for 
that it does not profess to be ; but as 
to the way of life and of eternal life, 
it is absolutely safe. 

1873. Breadth of Bible-Guidance. — 
How large a space does a candle oc- 
cupy ? Just a little hole in the candle- 
stick. But when it shines out to the 
poor traveler that has lost his way in 
the morass at midnight, how far it 
reaches ! And although the Word of 
God does not cover much ground, the 
ground that it does cover is so vital, 
and it stands so connected with man's 
life here and hereafter, that it shines 
with a clear light across all time, and 
into eternity. 

1874. Little Things in Scripture. — 
There is many a fern that has laid its 
cheek to the clay and died — the most 
insignificant event, apparently, con- 
ceivable ; and yet, after thousands 
and thousands of years, comes the 
geologist, and when the miner has 
laid bare the plant's figure stamped 
upon the stone, he reads in it a history 
of ages long ago. It is just the fact, 
it may be, needed to establish certain 
great theories ; and this poor vegeta- 
ble, unnoticed when alive, and not 
heeded when dead, finds itself, after 
many ages, summoned as a witness 
into the sunshine, to testify to men in 
what steps and in what order God 
built the world. So, many an event 
recorded in Scripture, that had little 
significance in the time of its happen- 
ing, becomes very important in later 
ages. 

1875. Unused Parts of the Bible. — 
There are those who believe in re- 
ligion and in the Bible to a great ex- 
tent, but who believe in these things 
as families in reduced circumstances 
in England used to believe in old 



mansions and castles. There were 
the structures, with magnificent rooms 
in them ; but the impoverished family 
were not able to furnish them and live 
in them. There were vast halls, once 
filled with kings, knights, and court- 
iers, but they were beyond the present 
family necessities. So, they were un- 
used, except that they were given up 
to rats, owls, and what not. There 
are a great many persons who are so 
reduced in faith that they say, " The 
chambers of the Old Testament had 
better be shut up, for we are not able 
to furnish them and live in them." 
They make use of certain rooms in 
the New Testament, and say, "We 
are believers not in the whole Bible, 
but in a considerable part of it." 

1876. Truths of Inspiration. — The 
Old Testament has a great deal of 
straw on which the wheat grew. I 
don't think we are bound to eat the 
straw. A judicious minister could 
separate the constituent elements of 
the Old Testament so that the part of 
it that remained for belief would in- 
jure no man's sense of the book being 
inspired. Inspiration works differently 
from the way in which the old fathers 
thought it worked, but none the less 
it works ; none the less, because you 
show where it does not work, do you 
vindicate the doctrine of the truth as 
to when it does work, and how. 

1877. Historical Need of the Old 
Testament. — It may be said that the 
Old Testament is a disconnected his- 
tory of the progress of righteousness 
in the human race ; not in detail, but 
generally. There are many who 
think that it has worn itself out ; that 
it is not fit for use any more. You 
might as well abolish the history of 
England, because the ancient days of 
England are not modern days. You 
might as well say that the history of 
the early Colonies in this country is 



398 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



of no account, because the Colonies 
differed so much from the present 
States, and because our wisdom is so 
much greater than theirs — if it is. 
The history of the early unfolding of 
ideas and institutions and tendencies 
is indispensable to the right concep- 
tion of our own time, our own 
privileges, and our own usages. 

1878. Literature of the Old Testa- 
ment. — My own belief is that, though 
the Old Testament is to be read with 
discrimination, and in the light of the 
knowledge that has accumulated 
about it during the ages that have 
passed since it was written, you will 
find within the lids of that book 
honey in the honeycomb. There are 
rude places in it ; but as travelers 
through deserts and over mountains 
here and there find sweet little valleys, 
so in reading the Old Testament you 
will find exquisite histories, beautiful 
scenes, and profound wisdom, such 
as are not contained in any other 
literature on the globe. 

1879. The Bible not Exhausted. — 
There never was a sea so pure that 
there was not mud at the bottom of it ; 
but this Hebrew nation has brought 
to us many virtues, many sublime 
qualities that belong to manhood ; 
and as long as the Old Testament en- 
dures we ought to be grateful to it, 
and to the authors of it, for those 
sources and fountains of moral in- 
fluence. I declare to you that we 
have not yet plucked all the flowers 
nor gathered all the grapes that grow 
on the vines of the Old Testament. 
When we walk up and down through 
its paths, no longer tied by a super- 
stitious theory of verbal inspiration, 
and with freedom bring our reason to 
bear, and, as emancipated men, dis- 
criminate between truth and error, 
right and wrong, we shall have much 
to harvest out of this book. 



1880. Truthfulness of the Old 
Testament. — The very evidence, to 
me, of the inspiration of the Old 
Testament Scriptures is that I find in 
the records of the early days what we 
ought to expect in those days — in- 
fantine knowledge and infantine 
moral strength in infantine men, and 
a simple history which reflects the 
condition of primitive morality as 
consisting of imperfect notions 
grouped under religious belief. If, in 
writing the biography of a child, I 
should put into that child's early life 
mature thoughts that would have been 
impossible to him, I should make him 
monstrous in the eyes of men — I 
should destroy the simplicity that is 
expected in childhood, and make a 
little monster instead of a little man ; 
and the attempt to substantiate the 
imperfect and erratic notions of an- 
tiquity by bringing the morality of 
our day to bear upon them, to 
subject them to the light which we 
have gained, to strain the text of 
the narrative and make it conform 
to facts as they exist five thousand 
years later than the time in which the 
actors lived — that process, through 
which many a man has put the 
Scripture, must have the effect of un- 
dermining men's confidence in it. 

1 88 1. Incompleteness of Biblical 
Statements. — To state to an audience 
a truth larger than the receptivity of 
that audience is, to all intents and 
purposes, not to state it to them. To 
explain to children in the nursery the 
operation of the Federal Courts as 
compared with the operation of the 
State Courts, would be to explain to 
them nothing at all, because they 
have not the elemental knowledge 
without which they cannot perceive 
the condition of things, nor cluster to- 
gether facts and make comparisons. 
You tell them nothing if you tell them 



THE BIBLE 



399 



that which is larger than they can 
take in. And if the inspired record 
was to be used to any advantage it 
must be adapted to tlie level and ca- 
pacity of that age of the human mind 
to which it was originally addressed — 
as it was. 

1882. Early Human Records. — 
There are a great many men that go 
through the Old Testament Scriptures 
and pick up the shucks ; they find 
nothing between Genesis and Malachi 
except something to make fun of. 
There is a great deal that is out-worn; 
there is a great deal that belongs to 
the waste of the human family. But 
I should like to see the man who 
would bring down the cradle in which 
his children had been rocked, and 
split it up for firewood, and laugh to 
see it burn. 

1883. The Bible Coeval with Man's 
Need. — You need not be afraid for 
your Bible. It is going to stand as 
long as humanity needs some sense of 
sympathy, as the medicine of sorrow, 
as long as weakness implores vainly 
against human strength and appeals 
to the Divine. 

1884. The Old Letter; the New 
Spirit. — After declaring that the Law 
was dead, and that men were not held 
by it any more, Paul went on to say : 
That we should " serve in newness of 
spirit, and not in the oldness of the 
letter." He denied the authority of 
Mosaism as applied to men who live 
by the spirit of Christ, although it was 
indispensable to earlier periods. And 
he was right. An egg-shell is very 
necessary before the chicken is 
hatched ; but would it not be very 
absurd to insist that the chicken 
should always wear the shell? The 
earlier statements, the earlier institu- 
tions, and the earlier methods of the 
Bible, when they had accompHshed 
their appropriate work, were super- 



seded by other provisions, and that 
without implying any contempt of 
these old instrumentahties. 

1885. Ancient Revelations Com- 
monplace. — Inspired writings may 
contain statements which in an after- 
age would require no inspiration. 
That is also true of revelation. One 
says, "You pretend that these are 
revelations, when there is not a 
schoolboy in our day that could not 
find them out, without having them 
revealed to him." Very likely; but 
in an early and undeveloped age a 
thing may be required to be made 
known through special methods which 
at a later period would not be required 
to be thus made known. We put a 
bottle to the mouths of babes ; but it 
does not follow, because when the 
child is forty years old he does not 
suck the bottle, that he did not need 
to suck it when he was a babe. 
Things are adapted to the wants of 
infantile helplessness which would be 
absurd at a time of later disclosure. 

1886. Inspired Use of Uninspired 
Material. — Inspiration is something 
much broader than revelation. It 
may be very generally defined as be- 
ing a Divine influence that quickens 
the faculties of men. At the very first 
step into the Bible, in Genesis, we find 
that inspiration, as it were, gathers up 
documents, statements of fact, that 
existed before, and makes them part 
and parcel of the inspired record. 
. . . Without doubt the ten genealo- 
gies came from the public records 
made just as any other genealog- 
ical records are — just as the public 
documents in Brooklyn are made, 
that are in the hands of the county 
clerk, and of which one might make a 
transcript. And so many existing 
documents were brought together in 
the making up of the Bible that, if it 
was produced under inspiration, we 



400 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



must see that inspiration admitted — 
nay, directed — the taking into the 
Word of God much of the hterature 
that had sprung up in the ordinary 
course of human thought and pro- 
cedure. 

1887. Revelation an Unveiling. — 
I pass by briefly the definition of 
" revelation," which is making known 
to men things not known before. 

As to the Word of God itself, it 
does not claim to be a book of revela- 
tions. It contains revelations ; but at 
first it did not stand on that ground, 
nor did it base its authority thereon. 
Indeed, there are very few revela- 
tions, as such, in the Bible. There 
are records innumerable of things that 
men at large had not found out, but 
that they were capable of finding out. 
Men were told in the Word of God 
much valuable truth, as a child is told 
by its mother, for the sake of early in- 
struction, many useful things that it 
has not yet learned, but that are 
within its reach. 

1888. Biblical Exactitude a Fatal 
Claim. — In showing on the chart 
where the Gedney's Channel runs 
through to New York, suppose the 
channel should be put down exactly 
right, but that in representing some 
other minor detail — the name of the 
maker of the chart, or what not — 
there should be a mistake ; so long as 
experience proved that there was no 
error in the location and width and 
depth of the channel, and no error 
that rendered vessels in passing 
through it liable to danger or incon- 
venience, would you denounce that 
chart as unauthentic ? The fact that 
there was in it a minor mistake here 
and there which did not interfere with 
its practical use would make no dif- 
ference with its real value. If we in- 
sist, as many people do, that the 
writings of the Old and New Testa- 



ments came directly from the mind of 
God, then the slightest variation from 
accuracy in any statement of fact 
would be fatal, because we should 
say, " God cannot lie " ; and yet 
there are many errors in the Scrip- 
tures. 

1889. Agreement as to Vital Ele- 
ments. — On the subject of essential 
7itanhood there is no difference of opin- 
ion about the Bible. The Roman 
Catholic Church and the Protestant 
Church see eye to eye so far as such 
matters are concerned. The sects 
may differ about philosophies and 
theologies, but not about honesty, pu- 
rity, truth, hope, love and joy in the 
Holy Ghost. So much of the Bible as 
it was meant that we should live by — 
is perfectly plain. . . . Under that 
system of moral inspiration which God 
has been carrying on in all nations 
and in every age of the world, the race 
have everywhere and in all ages come 
to the same results. They have found 
the law of human life. Just as a man 
finds the law of electricity or light, so 
men through thousands of years have 
found what are the qualities of charac- 
ter which fit them for time and eternity ; 
and the united testimony of mankind 
on that subject is both comprehensive 
and simple, and is absolutely without 
any objection whatsoever from critics 
or infidels. 

1890. Rejection of the Old Testa- 
ment. — The Old Testament, for a va- 
riety of reasons, has passed out of use 
for many men and women who call 
themselves Christians. Because there 
are so many parts of the Old Testa- 
ment that have inherent difficulties in 
them ; because there are so many 
things recorded which men are sup- 
posed to be obliged to believe, but 
which strain belief to the uttermost ; 
because there are such wondrous mir- 
acles, such remarkable phenomena, 



THE BIBLE 



401 



such associated historical statements, 
so many things that, according to 
modern and ordinary interpretation, 
seem exaggerated if not absolutely 
erroneous, rather than take such state- 
ments and difficulties implicitly they 
find it easier to put aside the whole 
book ; and because it is hard to get 
gold out of the rock they throw the 
rock and the gold all away in a heap, 
and let them alone. 

1891. Genesis. — Such an account 
of the Creation as could be developed 
in its details at this age of the world 
would have been absolutely useless to 
an early period, just as a treatise on 
optics would be of no use to children 
in the nursery ; so if all that is in- 
cluded in geology, geography, botany, 
ethnology, and biology had been put 
into the account of Genesis in the early 
period, there would have been no one 
on earth competent to understand it. 
It would have been like eloquence to 
a babe in the cradle, or philosophical 
knowledge to a child. 

1892. Time of the Patriarchs. — I re- 
member full well how, in summers, 
after the heat set in, I have betaken 
myself to the mountain country, and 
climbed to the top of some high moun- 
tain, some Mount Washington. With 
what an inexpressible delight I sat in 
its stillness, far above the circumjacent 
land, far above the city, the village, 
the hamlets, and looked out and down 
upon all these things which seemed to 
me like a vision and a dream ! And 
to sit alone, and to look at these, was 
itself a refreshment and a profit to my 
spirit greater than I can describe. 
Somewhat in the same way it affects 
me to go back to these early periods 
of the human family, to get apart from 
that which is familiar, and look out 
again from this distant standpoint 
over the life which we are now 
living. 



1893. Old Testament Laws. — The 
thunder of God's justice and the threat- 
enings of God's law were sounded out 
continually because men were on so 
low a plane that they needed just that 
development of the Divine nature that 
should meet their conditions and cir- 
cumstances. In a rude way that is 
very much what you will see in our 
jails and courts of justice. Here 
comes a man that has been a robber, 
a house-breaker, a sneak-thief full of 
all sorts of evasions and dissipations. 
See how the constable treats him. 
"Come here, you fellow! Step in 
there ! Get out of the way ! " And 
down he pushes him. He does not 
treat the man like a gentleman ; he is 
not a gentleman, he is no better than 
a brute beast ; he beats his wife at 
home, and he lies faster than a horse 
can trot ; he is a miserable wretch ; 
everything has been tried with him 
and it is no use. Then there comes 
in a woman who, in the poverty of 
the family and in the hopelessness of 
hunger, has stolen a loaf of bread and 
has been arraigned before the Courts. 
Tears are running down her cheeks, 
and you see the very constable himself 
pull out his cotton snub of a handker- 
chief and rub his cheeks down. " Sit 
down, ma'am, please," says he. She 
is the victim of law broken, to be sure ; 
but justice treats her much more deli- 
cately, much more kindly than it does 
the old arrant and oft-convicted crim- 
inal. So in the revelation of God's 
law and God's government to men : 
the men that need thunder get it. 

1894. Meaning in Petty Mosaic De- 
tails. — It does seem, when a man is 
told that the Mosaic institutes contain 
God's inspired laws, and when he 
finds in them the precept for the bar- 
ber shop, " Ye shall not round the 
corners of your heads, neither shalt 
thou mar the corners of thy beard," 



402 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



as though these were matters fit for 
ridicule. . . . But in heathen nations 
the cutting of the hair and beard was 
indicative of the reUgious worship of 
the wearer. Cutting the hair in a given 
way was supposed to imply adhesion 
to the gods of the foul idolaters, and 
cutting it in a certain other way was 
supposed to indicate fidelity to the 
God of the Hebrews. When, there- 
fore, Moses dictated the trimming of 
hair and beard, it was a separation be- 
tween them and the idolatrous nations 
around about them. 

Was there no difference, during our 
Civil War, between blue and butter- 
nut ? To-day a man can wear butternut 
or any other color he pleases, and no 
man shall call him to account for it ; 
but during that strife it meant all the 
difference between friends and ene- 
mies — between men for the Union and 
men for the Confederacy. 

1895. Mosaic Training. — The mat- 
ter of uncleanness was sometimes 
carried to a remarkable degree. If a 
dead insect fell into a dish for the 
table, that dish must not be eaten, 
just as with us if a cockroach gets 
into a plate of food, the whole has to 
go. In our modern restaurants they 
would take out the cockroach and 
give you the food. I prefer to board 
with Moses. According to the Mosaic 
prescription, if a man bore a pitcher 
of water, and a dead insect fell into 
it, he must break the pitcher as well 
as throw away the water. This was 
no hardship, considering the sort of 
pitchers they had in the early days. 
It might seem otherwise in our modern 
times of exquisite ceramic ware. In 
those days a broken pitcher was no 
loss, because one could be made in ten 
minutes. ... It was all in the direc- 
tion of compeUing carefulness and 
punishing carelessness, as children are 
trained at school. 



1896. Old Testament Judged by 
the New. — It may be that Joshua 
was justified in taking the cities of 
Palestine, and in their extermination ; 
but he was not justified in heaping 
contempt upon the five kings whom 
he had taken, by having his captains 
tread on their necks. It was accord- 
ing to the human spirit of that day ; but 
it was not according to the spirit of 
God, as revealed by Jesus Christ. . . . 
This policy of early times recorded in 
the Old Testament is foreign to the 
spirit of Christ. You cannot conceive 
of Christ looking upon such slaughter 
as is represented as having taken 
place in olden times, and approving 
it. Nor can you reconcile the revela- 
tion of a God, made known in the 
shedding of his own blood through 
his Son that the world might be re- 
deemed from sin, with this account of 
a God that employed a nation of men 
to shed the blood of hundreds of 
thousands. ... If you say that by 
criticising such things in the Old 
Testament we shall destroy the force 
of the Bible on the common people, 
my reply is that if you do not do 
something to remove the stigma of 
such things from the name of God you 
will destroy the true idea of God himself 
among thinking people. The at- 
tempt to save the Bible by destroying 
God is a poor bargain. 

1897. Deuteronomy. — Deuteronomy 
is, literally speaking, the Second Law, 
— a recapitulation, a second law-giv- 
ing or enunciation of the Law. If 
Washington's farewell letter had in- 
cluded the whole history of the 
Colonies in brief, and the theory of 
the Constitution, with the general 
features and the policy of the free 
commonwealth, that would have been 
exactly a parallel of Deuteronomy, 
which is in the form of a farewell letter 
of Moses to the people, and contains 



THE BIBLE 



403 



a recital of their history, and the laws 
and ordinances imposed upon them 
by Ciod through Moses. 

1898. Ancient Names. — With us 
names are mere bell-pulls and door- 
knockers — things hung on a man with- 
out any regard to their significance, 
to distinguish him from his neighbors ; 
tliis is the case with all nations which 
are advanced in civilization ; but in 
the primitive ages, as also among our 
American Indians to-day, names were 
always signiticant, as they arose from 
external circumstances. . . . And this 
woman was called Naomi, the Pleas- 
ant, the Beautiful, the Comely ; but 
she said, " Do not call me the Beautiful 
any more— call me Mara, the Bitter ; 
for God hath dealt bitterly with me." 

1899. The Story of Ruth. — A dia- 
mond in its rough and ordinary state 
is not lustrous nor beautiful ; nor is it 
so until it has been ground, and arti- 
ficial facets and angles are raised 
upon it : but when it has gone through 
the processes of being cut and pol- 
ished it is one of the loveliest of 
gems. The pearl, however, suffers 
no hand to touch it. It is already 
perfect, and handling mars it. 

There are many doctrinal passages 
in the Bible that are obscure, and that 
need much exposition to discover 
the precious truth within them. 
There are some — and we have come 
upon one of them to-night — that 
would be in danger of being dimmed 
and hurt if handled. 

1900. The Book of Ruth. — After 
the roar of battle, when the army 
is removed from the field, and the 
hospital is abandoned ; when the 
soldiers have gone home, and have 
been greeted, with music, with social 
exhilaration, with the ringing of bells, 
with lights in the windows ; when 
there is joy in every home, and they 
have settled down into domestic 



peace, how strange is that peace in 
contrast with the rude alarms of war! 

Out of the turbulent times, the 
dark days, of the Judges through 
which we have been finding our way, 
upon what have we come .'' This 
sweet idyl of Ruth, in which, from 
beginning to end, there is no discord ; 
in which peace flows unbrokenly ; 
and in which are manifested the purest 
feelings of patriotism and of love. 
The whole flow of the narrative is 
idyllic, pastoral, peaceful, beautiful. 
Its sentences sound in our ears, after 
we are done reading them, as the bell 
in the belfry still warbles through the 
air long after the tongue has ceased 
to strike. We leave it as a vision of 
beauty, a rare picture, an exquisite 
portrayal, made more beautiful be- 
cause it comes from the thunder of 
war, and is interjected into the rude 
manners and gross morality of a far- 
removed age — beautiful as poetry, 
beautiful as a drama, and yet more 
admirable as a truth of history. 

1 90 1. The Prophets. — I am pro- 
foundly affected by the grandeur of 
prophecy. God unveils the frescoed 
wall of the future, not so much that 
we may count the figures, and meas- 
ure the robes, and analyze the 
pigments, but that, gazing upon it, 
our imaginations may be enkindled, 
and hope be inspired, to bear us 
through the dismal barrenness of the 
present. Prophecy was not addressed 
to the reason, nor to the statistical 
faculty, but to the imagination ; and I 
should as soon think of measuring 
love by the scales of commerce, or of 
admiring flowers by the rule of feet 
and inches, or of applying arithmetic 
to taste and enthusiasm, as calcula- 
tions and figures to these grand evan- 
ishing signals which God waves in the 
future only to tell the world which way 
it is to march. 



404 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



igo2. Symbolism of the Bible. — 
The " word-pictures " in Isaiah and 
Daniel and the Revelation of John, 
though descriptions, are symbols and 
figures playing on the imagination ; 
which if at once reduced by art to 
definite form, not only lose all their 
beauty, but are worse than grotesque 

they are ridiculous, as any man 

may see on looking at Van Eyck's 
pictures — of the Flemish school — of 
the Lamb with seven eyes and ten 
horns, holding something in his split 
hoof, which represents the hand. In- 
deed, even as a symbol and imagina- 
tively considered, it is all we can do 
to read those figures of the prophets 
and the Apocalyptic writer ; but to 
reduce them to absolute form is pre- 
posterous. And the same thing we 
see in literature. The Ariels and the 
witches of Shakespeare are charming 
and striking when they are read, but 
ridiculous when they are acted. The 
conception is so subtile, and belongs 
to so tenuous an atmosphere, that we 
cannot bear it in flesh-and-blood 
form. 

1903. Miracles Supplemental. — 
Large steam-ships are accustomed to 
have small supplemental engines 
which pump the boilers full of water, 
and blow up the fuel to heat the great 
boilers, and so get the great engine in 
motion ; but as quick as the great 
engine is in motion, it pumps its own 
water, and blows up its own fuel. 

Now what a donkey-engine is to a 
marine engine, that I think a miracle 
is to the ordinary course of nature. 
Miracles were little engines employed 
before the great world-engine got 
agoing, to do things which afterwards 
it did for itself, so that these little 
engines could be dispensed with, 

1904. Efficiency of Miracles. — Mira- 
cles were designed to make men be- 
lieve in invisible things. There are 



great truths that it concerns men to 
know and recognize which they can- 
not discern with their outward senses, 
and which it is the office of miracles 
to aid them to discern. And when a 
thing does what you set it to do, that 
is all that you can ask of it. We do 
not think a locomotive engine is good 
for nothing because it does not dig 
potatoes. Does it draw trains on the 
road, and carry them from place to 
place with almost incredible rapidity ? 
It does, and therefore it does the 
thing for which it was designed ; and 
that is enough. We do not care 
whether miracles did things which 
modern men demand or not. The 
question is, " Did they make men be- 
lieve there was a God, and that there 
were invisible powers and existences? " 
They did. Miracles, then, did a work 
the most difficult, and proved them- 
selves to be divine by accomplishing 
the thing for which they were sent. 

1905. Miracles of To-day. — Mira- 
cles are like candles lit up until the 
sun rises, and then blown out. There- 
fore, I am amused when I hear sects 
and churches talk about having 
evidence of Divine authority because 
they have miracles. Miracles in our 
time are like candles in the street at 
midday. We do not want miracles. 
They are to teach men how to find 
out truths themselves ; and after they 
have learned this, they no more need 
them than a well man needs a staff, or 
than a grown-up child needs a walk- 
ing-stool. They are the educating 
expedients of the early periods of the 
world. As such, they are divinely 
wise ; after they have served their 
purpose as such, it is humanly foolish 
for persons to pretend to have them. 

1906, Elijah's Dramatic Career. — 
There are not elsewhere in recorded 
history such dramatic elements as in 
the career of Elijah, Irregular, 



THE BIBLE 



40^ 



almost iUful, Elijah the Tishbile seemed 
at times clean gone forever, dried up 
like a summer's brook. Then sud- 
denly, like that stream after a storm on 
the hills, he came down with a flood. 
His sudden appearances and as sud- 
den vanishings were perfectly natural 
to one who had been reared, as he 
had been, among a nomadic people, 
not unlike the Bedouin Arabs. But 
to us they seem more like the mystery 
of spiritual apparitions. 

1907. The Hebrew Prophets, — The 
absolute spontaneity of the old 
prophet, in contrast with the per- 
functory priest, is admirable. Out of 
a ritual service rigid as a rock is seen 
gushing a liberty of utterance that re- 
minds one of the rock in the wilder- 
ness when smitten with the prophet's 
rod. Although the prophets were tJie 
religious men, far more revered for 
sanctity than the priests, it was not 
because they held aloof from secular 
affairs. They were often men of 
rigor, but never ascetics. They never 
despised common humanity, either in 
its moral or in its secular relations. 

1908. The Twenty-Third Psalm. — 
David has left no sweeter psalm than 
the short Twenty-Third. It is but a 
moment's opening of his soul ; but, as 
when one, walking the winter street, 
sees the door opening for some one to 
enter, and the red light streams a mo- 
ment forth, and the forms of gay chil- 
dren are running to greet the comer, 
and genial music sounds, though the 
door shuts and leaves the night black, 
yet it cannot shut back again all 
that the eye, the ear, the heart, and 
the imagination have seen, so in this 
psalm, though it is but a moment's 
opening of the soul, are emitted truths 
of peace and consolation that will 
never be absent from the world. 

1909. The Twenty-Third Psalm. — 
This is the nightingale of Psalms. 



It is small, of homely feather, singing 
shyly out of obscurity ; but O, it has 
filled the air of the whole world with 
melodious joy greater than the heart 
can conceive. 

1 910. David, the Warrior. — Thy ar- 
rows turned not back ; mighty ones 
fell beneath thy sword : but those sil- 
ver shafts of song, drawn from a 
quiver beyond Apollo's, pierce the 
heart, not to slay but to heal. 

191 1. Great Meaning in Small 
Texts. — The boy holds his ball of 
twine in his hand, and thinks it is not 
much, he can clasp it so easily ; but 
when he begins to unroll it, and his 
wind-borne kite mounts higher and 
higher, he is astonished to see how 
long it is. So there are little texts 
which look small in your palm, but 
when caught up upon some experience 
they unroll themselves, and stretch 
out until there is no measuring their 
length. 

1912. Perpetuity of the Bible. — Let 
none be alarmed lest the Bible should 
be destroyed. Do you suppose that 
when the cluster is crushed it is gone 
and lost ? Its juice goes to wine, and 
is saved. You are not going to crush 
the Bible any further than to turn it 
into wine. Its external form may be 
changed here and there ; the mere 
historical methods by which its teach- 
ings were communicated to men may 
be modified : but in so far as it is a 
vehicle of real truths, it will endure. 

1 9 13. Immutability of the Bible. — 
You can destroy the Bible by burning 
the paper it is on ; but you can never 
destroy that which is the Bible, and 
the resolute, ineffaceable spirit of God 
that is in it. It is the God that is in 
the Bible that makes it immortal, and 
gives it this power ; and the ideals 
that are in it you cannot destroy. The 
Bible is the opening of a royal view 
of the interior of the universe ; and 



4o6 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



yon are never going to take that away 
again. You might just as well be 
afraid that the stars will all go out be- 
cause some man has a new theory of 
astronomy. The stars are steadfast in 
their courses ; and the Bible is God's 
illustration of truth. It is the book 
that gathers up the things which have 
been found out, or learned, or thrown 
by the light of God's Spirit into this 
world, among men ; and those things 
are not going to be changed by any 
theory of inspiration, nor by any sal- 
vatory or destroying process upon the 
outside of the material quality of the 
Bible. 

1914. Supreme Elements of the 
New Testament. — I often think that 
the New Testament is like a mansion 
built on high ground, in a region of 
magnificent scenery, whose windows 
open on every side upon views of 
transcendent interest. Although the 
mansion itself is comfortably furnished 
within, and pleasing, yet memorable 
is it chiefly for what one sees outside 
of it, and through its windows. The 
New Testament is a book full of pre- 
cepts of wisdom for this life ; it is full 
of secular wisdom ; it has in it promise 
of the life that now is, and of that 
which is to come ; the mansion is 
handsomely furnished within: but its 
chief merits, its peculiar character- 
istics, are the openings which it makes 
into the spiritual and invisible world. 

It is precisely at this point, however, 
that modern rationalism and all that 
scepticism which flows from it attempt 
to do away with that which is the very 
glory of the whole — namely, its super- 
sensuousness, and its revelation of 
spiritual Divine truth. 

1 91 5. New Testament the Hand- 
Book. — When a man attempts to be 
an agriculturist, he first finds out the 
general processes of agriculture, and 
sets about conforminjr his life to the 



ascertained nature of that department. 
The New Testament lays down the 
facts, the principles, the courses, ac- 
cording to which a man should de- 
velop his spiritual or religious life. 

1916. New Testament Miracles. — 
The superiority of spiritual power over 
sensuous, is the illuminating truth of 
the New Testament. The Gospels 
should be taken or rejected unniuti- 
lated. The disciples plucked the 
Avheat-heads, and, rubbing them in 
their hands, they ate the grain. But 
our sceptical believers take from the 
New Testament its supernatural ele- 
ment, — rub out the wheat, — and eat 
the chaff. 

1917. Miraculous Elements. — There 
is a graphic and dramatic way of 
treating all these strange and miracu- 
lous elements as Shakespeare treated 
the supernatural — using it for his pur- 
pose, but leaving it without an attempt 
to explain or to make intelligibly real. 
In fact, these things occur in the New 
Testament in much that way. They 
come quietly into view, like a cloud — 
which looms up, casts its shadow on 
the landscape for a time, and passes 
away without effort or commotion. 
Treated thus, they offend no darling 
theory ; no critic is agitated to attack 
the view ; and the moral and spiritual 
effect aimed at is achieved. 

igi8. Silences of the New Testa- 
ment. — In 1850 I went first to the 
White Mountains; and with a brother 
beloved, ascending from the side of 
the Glen House, I reached the sum- 
mit, and then took the road and trav- 
eled some twelve miles along the line 
of the mountains down to the Craw- 
ford House, On the way I separated 
myself from the party and went alone. 
It was such a day as this ; and I was 
so high that there was absolute still- 
ness. Not a cricket lived up there. 
There was not a grasshopper to jump. 



THE BIBLE 



407 



There was not a bird that winged it- 
self in the air. There was no wind ; 
and if there had been, there was no 
leaf nor brush that it could have 
shaken for music. My own footsteps, 
crackling, sounded strange. I walked 
in a vision. And I tell you, that not 
the riches nor the thunder of the 
cities, not all the great treasures of 
Europe, not the armed throngs that I 
saw flashing in review there, not the 
sea, nothing, ever seemed to me so 
sublime as the absolute stillness of 
that upper air. And when I go into 
the higher places of the Word of God, 
and stand above all the limited human 
notions and conceptions which have 
been borrowed from base passions, 
and intermixed with vain philosophy; 
when I reach those airy heights where 
Christ stood, and where his sublimest 
followers stood, and see that in their 
highest moments they had nothing to 
say, then the silence of the New Tes- 
tament is more impressive to me than 
its utterances, 

I gig. How to Read the Life of 
Christ. — If a man reads his Tribune or 
his Times before breakfast, he reads 
more than the whole evangel of Mat- 
thew. You can read the evangel of 
Matthew in less time than you can sit 
down and read a modern newspaper. 
If a man should take a whole evangel, 
and read it through at one time, he 
would say, " That is rather overdoing 
the matter." And yet, the true way 
to read the life of Christ is to take in 
the full portraiture ; to look at the 
whole picture; to bring the whole 
character up clearly before the mind. 

ig20. Irregularity of the Gospel 
Stones. — Differences in mere arrange- 
ment [of events in the Gospels] are in- 
evitable, and not important. No two 
harmonists ever did agree in all par- 
ticulars, and it is scarcely possible 
that any two ever will. The very 



structure of the Gospels makes it well- 
nigh impossible. They are not like 
the " dissected maps," or pictures, 
whose severed parts can, with some 
patience, be fitted together into the 
original whole, a hundred times ex- 
actly alike. They are little more, 
often, than copious indexes of a volu- 
minous life, without dates or order. 
It is not probable that a single note 
was taken, or a line written, in Christ's 
lifetime. The Gospels are children 
of the memory. They were vocally 
delivered hundreds of times before be- 
ing written out at all ; and they bear 
the marks of such origin, in the in- 
tensity and vividness of individual in- 
cidents, while chronological order and 
literary imity are but little regarded. 

192 1, The Angelic Ministrations. — 
We could not imagine the Advent 
stripped of its angelic lore. The dawn 
without a twilight, the sun without 
clouds of silver and gold, the morn- 
ing on the fields without dew-dia- 
monds, — but not the Saviour without 
his angels ! They shine within the 
Temple, they bear to the matchless 
mother a message which Avould have 
been disgrace from mortal lips, but 
which from theirs fell upon her as 
pure as dewdrops upon the hlies of 
the plain of Esdraelon. They com- 
muned with the Saviour in his glory 
of transfiguration, sustained him in 
the anguish of the garden, watched at 
the tomb ; and as they had thronged 
the earth at his coming, so they seem 
to have hovered in the air in multi- 
tudes at the hour of his ascension. 
Beautiful as they seem, they are never 
mere poetic adornments. The occa- 
sions of their appearing are grand. 
The reasons are weighty. Their de- 
meanor suggests and befits the high- 
est conception of superior beings. 
. . . They vibrate between the visi- 
ble and the invisible. They come 



4o8 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



without motion. They go without 
flight. They dawn, and disappear. 
Their words are few, but the Advent 
Chorus yet is sounding its music 
through the world. 

1922. John the Baptist. — John's 
camel's hair and food of the wilder- 
ness were well enough ; his stern 
morality and burning zeal in reform- 
ing his people were commendable ; 
but not all of them revealed his true 
nobility as did the reply of this un- 
sectarian leader to his sectarian disci- 
ples : "I am not the Christ. I am 
sent before him. He must increase, I 
must decrease." Thus John yielded 
up his place, even as a flower falls 
and dies that it may give place to the 
fruit that swells beneath it. 

1923. Forms of Baptism. — Cere- 
monialism tends to scrupulosity, and 
scrupulosity to superstition, and su- 
perstition is idolatry. To this day 
men are yet camped down beside the 
Jordan, disputing about baptism ; and 
now, as then, in the full blaze of a 
system whose whole force is spiritual, 
disciples are divided, not even on an 
ordinance, but on the external method 
of its administration. Good men have 
intrenched their consciences behind 
an externality of an externality. Nor 
is the whole common spiritual wealth 
of Christianity able to unite men who 
have quarrelled over the husk and 
rind of a symbolical ordinance. 

There came near being two sects [in 
the beginning]. It needed only that 
the leaders on this question of baptism 
should take sides with their disciples 
effectually to split their common 
movement into two warring halves. 
Jesus, seeing the danger, not only left 
the neighborhood, but ceased baptiz- 
ing. There is no record or hint from 
this day that any of his disciples, or 
even that his own Apostles, were bap- 
tized. 



1924. The Temptation of Jesus. — 
Had this scene been recorded of some 
of the prophets hundreds of years be- 
fore, it would have harmonized ad- 
mirably with the narratives which re- 
late the old prophetic histories. But 
in the later days of Gospel history 
this scene of temptation is like some 
gigantic boulder drifted out of its place 
and historic relations, and out of sight 
and memory of the cliffs to which in 
kind it belonged. It is in perfect ac- 
cord with the elder Hebrew nature, 
and it was the last and greatest of that 
sublime series of prophetic tableaux, 
through which Hebrew genius de- 
livered to the world its imperishable 
contributions of moral truth. 

1925. Jesus and Solomon. — The 
Saviour's discourses show that his 
mind was peculiarly adapted to read 
the Book of Proverbs with keen relish. 
Under his eye the practical wisdom of 
those curt sentences, the insight into 
men's motives which they give, those 
shrewd lessons of experience, must 
have had a larger interpretation than 
they were wont to receive. If one 
has observed how the frigid annals of 
history, when Shakespeare read them, 
blossomed out into wonderful dramas, 
he can partly imagine what Solomon's 
philosophy must have become under 
the eye of Jesus. 

1926. Aptness of Jesus' Parables. — 
The parables of Jesus were not born 
in the closet, and brought forth like 
perfected poems to do their work. 
They sprang into being suddenly. 
They were creatures of life, born of 
the actual events then taking place. 
Beautiful of themselves as luminous 
moral fictions, their force is far greater 
when we perceive their illustrative fit- 
ness. The parable of the Good Sa- 
maritan arose out of a discussion. 

1927. Parables and Events. — The 
parables of Jesus, as we find them in 



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409 



the Gospels, are like pearls cast into a 
jewel-case, without order or selection. 
The thread that connected them is 
lost. But we often find an inward 
congruity between the parable and 
the events just then happening, that 
creates a probability as to the order. 
Thus the two parables respecting the 
imminence of death would seem nat- 
urally to have followed the parable of 
the rich fool. There are two ; one in 
light, the other in shadow — Death as 
a bridegroom, Death as a thief in the 
night. 

1928. Sermon on the Mount: Loft- 
iness. — There was no inequality or 
unharmony in the whole discourse. 
The pitch at the beginning was taken 
far above the line of any doctrine 
then in practice, and to the end the 
elevation was sustained. It was the 
teaching of one who saw men as men 
had never yet been. The possible 
manhood, never yet developed, was 
familiar to Jesus, and upon that 
ideal he fashioned every precept. 
Not a note fell from the pitch. Every 
single thought was brought up to a 
manhood far transcending that of his 
own age. 

1929. Sermon on the Mount: Not 
Original. — Men are fond of speaking 
of the originality of the Sermon on 
the Mount ; but originality would have 
defeated its very aim. All growth 
must sprout from roots pre-existing in 
the soul. There can be no new, ex- 
cept by the help of some old. To have 
spread out a novel field of unfamiliar 
truth before the people might have led 
them to speculation, but could not have 
aroused their conscience, nor rebuked 
the degradation of their natures and 
the sordidness of their lives. It was the 
very aim of the Sermon on the Mount 
to place before the Jews, in the clear- 
est light, the great truths out of which 
sprung their Law and their prophets. 



as a preparation for the new and 
higher developments that would come 
afterwards. 

1930. Sermon on the Mount : Open- 
ing. — On a lonely hilltop sat one 
known to have been reared as a 
mechanic, pronouncing to a group of 
peasants, fishermen, mechanics, and 
foreigners the sublime truths of the 
higher and interior life of the soul, 
which have since by universal con- 
sent been deemed the noblest utter- 
ances of earth. The traveler may 
to-day stand in Antwerp, near the old 
cathedral, hearing all the clatter of 
business, a thousand feet tramping 
close up to the walls and buttresses 
against which lean the booths, a 
thousand tongues rattling the language 
of traffic, when, as the hour strikes 
from above, a shower of notes seems 
to descend from the spire, — bell 
notes, fine, sweet, small as a bird's 
warble, the whole air full of crisp 
tinkhngs, underlaid by the deeper and 
sonorous tones of large bells, but all 
of them in fit sequences pouring forth 
a melody that seems unearthly, and 
the more because in such contrast with 
the scenes of vulgar life beneath. In 
some such way must these words have 
fallen upon the multitude. 

Whether the audience felt the 
sweetness and exquisite beauty of 
Christ's opening sentences we cannot 
know. They are the choicest truths 
of the old dispensation set to the spirit 
of the new. But not until, like bells, 
they were thus set in chimes and rung 
in the spirit and melody of the spirit- 
ual age, could one have dreamed how 
noble they were. 

1 93 1. Undesired Gems. — I would 
rather look at a ruby than drink ten 
glasses of wine. And yet, I will tell 
you of a casket that has more jewels 
than Tiffany ever dreamed of, and 
stranger ones, too. Although they 



4IO 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



are witliin the rcacli of everybody, I 
have seldom seen them set — at any 
rate, I have seldom seen them set so 
that they were altogether. " Blessed 
are the poor in spirit:" one gem. 
"Blessed are they that mourn:" 
another gem. " Blessed are the 
meek." "Blessed are they that 
hunger and thrist after righteousness " 
— those that have soul-hunger. 
" Blessed are the merciful." " Blessed 
are the pure in heart." " Blessed 
are the peacemakers." " Blessed 
are they that are persecuted." 
Did you ever see such a string 
of jewels in your life ? But you 
would not wear them. If they 
were strung and put on your neck 
you would not like them. And yet 
no opal is more spirituellc, no dia- 
mond has such a pure white light, no 
ruby has such a color of red, no 
emerald is so green, no sapphire is so 
blue, no gem is so magnificent as they 
are. And when you see them in other 
people you think so, though you may 
not know what it is that makes them so 
sweet and pleasant to you. 

1932. The Beatitudes. — The Ser- 
mon on the Mount was a criticism of 
the received doctrine. Every part of 
it brings down to us the odor and 
flavor of the best days and the ripest 
things of the Old Testament dispensa- 
tion. It was the mount from which 
men looked over into the promised 
land of the spirit. Even the Beati- 
tudes, an exquisite prelude, which 
seems like a solemn hymn sung before 
a service, are but a collection and bet- 
ter ordering of maxims or aphorisms 
which existed in the Old Testament. 

1933. The Lord's Prayer. — One 
knows not which most to admire in 
this form, — its loftiness of spirit, its 
comprehensiveness, its brevity, its 
simplicity, or its union of human and 
divine elements. Our admiration of 



it is not disturbed by that criticism 
which questions its originality and 
finds it to be made up, in part, of 
prayers already existing. Is the 
diamond less princely among stones 
because its constituent elements can 
be shown in other combinations ? The 
brilliant contrast between the inor- 
ganic elements and their crystalline 
form is a sufficient answer. All prayer 
may be said to have crystallized in 
this prayer. The Church has worn 
it for hundreds of years upon her 
bosom, as the brightest gem of de- 
votion. 

^934- Persons Associated with 
Jesus. — Out of the nameless crowd 
some striking figure emerges, — a ruler, 
a centurion, a maniac, a foreign 
woman. Under the eye of Christ 
these personages glow for a moment 
with intense individuality, and then 
sink back into obscurity. No history 
precedes them ; no after account of 
them is given. Like the pictures 
which the magic lantern throws upon 
the screen, they seem to come from 
the air and to melt again into noth- 
ing ; and yet, while they remain, 
every line is distinct and every color 
intense. 

1935. Discoursing at the Last 
Supper. — There is no part of the clos- 
ing history of the Saviour's life more 
wonderful than the record which John 
makes of his last interviews with his 
disciples. . . . They are full of what 
may be called a love-lore, such as is 
to be found in no other literature, and 
such as refuses to be interpreted by 
the ordinary love-literature of human 
society. Such love, so high, so full 
of divine intellection, so full of 
spiritual impulse, so full of regrets 
tempered by a better knowledge, 
so full of aspiration, so full of 
faith, so tender, so gentle, touching 
the human soul on all sides so potently 



THE BIBLE 



411 



— we know not where to look for any- 
thing, till we hear it from the lips of 
God in heaven, that can be compared 
with this representation in those 
chapters in John, — chapters which 
have this trouble : that they are like 
fruit-trees which grow so high that 
children stepping under them can 
take only windfalls, being unable to 
reach up into the boughs, where 
the fruit is ripest, and where the sun 
has given it its best colors. It is only 
through the medium of higher forms 
of experience, which are not given 
to all, and which are seldom vouch- 
safed to any, that one can enter into 
these discourses and interpret them. 

1936. Name-Associations. — A man's 
own name takes hold of a thousand 
inward chords, and may be so pro- 
nounced that almost every nerve and 
sensibility of his being shall be 
thrilled with it. 

One of the most matchless scenes 
in the New Testament history is con- 
nected with this, where after he came 
forth on that blessed morning, Jesus 
walked in the garden, and Mary, the 
most devoted of all the women, could 
not see him because of her tears (for 
people's griefs are very apt to hide 
from them the presence of the Com- 
forter), and she said to him, supposing 
he was the gardener, " Sir, if thou 
hast taken him away, tell me where 
thou hast laid him." But he who 
had spoken with her, and had not 
been recognized by her, simply pro- 
nounced her name, " Mary ! " and 
with that she cried out, in an ecstasy 
of remembrance and of love and of 
gladness, " Rabboni ! " and would 
have clasped his feet. The whole 
force of this scene was in the line of 
the history of her heart or past 
associations, and of all her hopes, 
and all her longings, and all the 
visions and aspirations which his 



company and teaching had inspired 
in her. These had been buried with 
him. She stood before him, and he 
talked with her, but not a single 
chord vibrated until he struck her 
name ; then her whole life burst out 
like the morning. 

1937. The Gospel of John. — I 
hardly see how one who has any 
sympathy in the slightest degree with 
the superior nature of Christ could 
consent to omit the Gospel of John. 
To my mind, the New Testament 
without John would be very much 
like a golden candlestick and a 
candle with the flame blown out. It 
is the very point of illumination. 

Other gospels give us what Jesus 
said and did, though not without 
many luminous points beside. But 
John, more than they all, gives what 
Christ was; the movement of his 
thought and of his affections, and the 
relation of the interior of his life with 
the great invisible world and with the 
moral sphere in which God dwells. 
It is the unexpressed Christ, as re- 
flected from the consciousness of a 
sympathetic disciple. If it be the 
invention of a later day, I had almost 
said that the man who invented it was 
himself worthy to be called divine ; so 
full is it of subtile spiritual elements 
not ordinarily revealed to the largest 
natures ; profound moral depths, to 
the sounding of which our experience 
has not yet enabled us. Every step 
of criticism which shall destroy its 
historic verity only leaves the problem 
of its origin more and more marvelous. 
But it will not be destroyed. It will 
stand, the noblest of the four. 

1938. Controversies about Christ. 
—I know of nothing which seems 
more offensive to me than the com- 
bative associations connected with 
texts of the New Testament which 
should rise up as so many fair pictures 



412 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



to US — as so many tlowcrs in the 
peaceful meadows. And over these 
very scenes in which the Ufe of Christ 
is opened, that it might come to our 
heart or imagination and inspire and 
guide us in the best feelings of our 
life — over all these tranquil scenes 
fierce war has raged ; and every part 
of the battlefield in the four Gospels, 
almost, is redolent, not so much of 
Christ as of the controversies about 
him which have prevailed in the 
Christian church. Happy will be 
those ages in which the associations 
of the New Testament are not con- 
troversial. 

1939. Great Religious Geniuses. — 
The great men of the world are those 
who discover or apply great truths to 
the times in which they live, in such 
a manner as to work effectual refor- 
mations of society. A man is great, 
not by the measure of his faculty, 
but by the results which he produces 
in life. Paul was, then, one of the 
greatest. He was greater than Peter, 
than John, than any since the days 
of Moses. Moses and Paul may be 
said to have formed the religious ages 
of the old and of the new dispensa- 
tions. Moses framed the civil and 
ethical truths into institutions ; David 
added the poetic and lyric element. 
Paul gave to his age the great 
organizing truths, and furnished in his 
own conduct an example of how to 
employ them ; John added the interior 
reflective, sentimental element. And 
so John was to Paul what David was 
to Moses. 

1940. Seventh and Eighth of Ro- 
mans. — I have seen, in the hill country, 
a little stream gathering from the 
springs, and holding its way with 
deepening water, until it enters a 
gorge. Dark evergreen trees make 
the place gloomy. Rocks and fallen 
timber hinder the stream. It falls 



headlong upon some stone, and is 
dashed to spray ; it trickles back to a 
channel, only to be caught and whirled 
in a dark pool ; and boiling out of that, 
it shoots now to the right, still em- 
broiled, and now to the left, but 
whether forward or sideways, always 
hindered, broken, and made to cry 
out and roar by its plunges and in- 
numerable interruptions. No flowers 
edge it. Its way is too sunless for 
beauty. But when, at length, far 
down, it sees beyond a glimpse of 
field and meadow, it takes cheer, and 
speeds on, until at length the broad 
sunshine strikes it, its cascades are 
fewer, its course evener, and at length 
beneath bending grasses, and simple 
flowers, and ruffling shrubs, and over 
smooth shining sand, it steals tran- 
quilly on, undisturbed, beautiful, and 
the cause of beauty on either bank. 

Such is the Seventh chapter of Ro- 
mans, — the soul in the cleft rocks of 
the mountain gorge ; and such the 
Eighth chapter of Romans, — the soul 
flowing deep in the fair fields of heav- 
enly joy. 

1941. Law and Gospel. — I defy any 
man to get out of the Seventh of 
Romans into the Eighth, e.\cept by 
that one word, "Christ." He who 
attempts it is like a leaf caught in the 
eddy of a stream ; it whirls round and 
wants to get down the stream, but 
cannot go. The Seventh of Romans 
is an eddy in which the conscience 
swings round and round in eternal 
disquiet and dissatisfaction ; the Lord 
Jesus Christ offers the deliverance and 
open passage to the freedom of the 
Eighth of Romans, — or, rather, is the 
talisman through which it receives the 
touch of Divine inspiration, and is 
lifted above, into the realm of true 
Divine beneficence. 

1942. Epistle to the Romans. — It 
is said that no one can at first take in 



THE BIBLE 



413 



the scope and magnitude of St. Peter's 
at Rome, and that the first impression 
is one of disappointment. Our senses 
are so unused to large measurements, 
that they do not take the meaning of 
such a gigantic cathedral. It is only 
when, by patient waiting and growing 
familiarity, the senses have opened 
and grown to a nobler use, that the 
full meaning of such a massive struc- 
ture begins to come to them. Then 
the immensity of the space, the rich- 
ness of the parts, the universality re- 
sulting from a well ordering of innu- 
merable details, begin to impress the 
mind ; and every day swells the dome, 
and carries forth the length and width 
of the interior, and harmonizes the 
multitudinous details until they lose 
their separateness, and become only 
the means and instruments of a won- 
derful whole. 

As you recede from it, miles and 
miles across the Campagna, there rises 
high into the air that sublime circle ; 
and when, by distance, all the subja- 
cent parts are sunken and lost, that 
magnificent globe hangs upon the sky, 
as if, like heavenly spheres, it needed 
no foundation, but hung suspended in 
the ether, buoyed up as ships are 
floated in the seas. 

It is even so with the Epistle to 
the Romans. The close of the Eighth 
chapter is the dome of the cathedral. 
It is only one's own whole life that 
can interpret it. At the first reading 
it seems confused. A certain wonder 
and wealth of meaning is apparent, 
but neither order nor harmony. But 
gradually the parts seem to unite ; the 
exceeding richness of single words or 
thoughts goes to compose a harmoni- 
ous whole. And the closing verses, 
rising like a vast dome, lift themselves 
above the earth, above the stars, and 
into that sacred space where heaven 
is, and the glory of God. 



1943. Struggles of the Flesh : Glory 
of the Spirit. — When I read the Eighth 
chapter of Romans it reminds me of 
what I have heard in the concert- 
room, in the overture to Wagner's 
Tannhauser, where the tempted soul 
is represented as being thrown under 
the influence of passions and weird 
spirits. The music shrills and thun- 
ders, and it would seem as though 
upon the mountain of temptation 
everything was wrapped in darkness, 
or had but lurid light ; and the whole 
is witch-music and waihng hideous 
cacophony : until by and by, afar off, 
one hears the voice of the Christian 
Pilgrim choir, that swells into an 
anthem ; and as the shrieks and the 
wails seem to lose power, it advances 
in fullness of tone, and spreads abroad 
until, at last, as if amid the tears of 
those that listen, the whole scene is 
conquered by the advancing melody 
and glorious harmony. So when I 
look upon life, and hear the persist- 
ent, piercing tones of the passions, 
the thunders of war and the moaning 
troubles of men, I hear, too, from afar, 
deep sounds of the coming glory ; and 
with the ages they shall grow deeper 
and spread wider ; and at last the 
whole universe itself shall join in 
triumphal procession, and the glory 
shall be to him that sitteth upon the 
throne, and to the Lamb forever. 

1944. I Corinthians, XIII. — Of all 
the symphonies that Beethoven ever 
wrote, the Fifth seems to me to be the 
center and chmax. The others stream 
out from it, as it were, like rays of 
light from a central sun. It is the one 
magnificent exhibition of consummate 
musical genius. Now, what the Fifth 
Symphony is to Beethoven's music, I 
think that the Thirteenth chapter of 
First Corinthians is to the Bible ; and 
especially to the New Testament. It 
is the more extraordinary because of 



414 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



the literary context in which it stands. 
It is as if, in a mighty battle, there 
should suddenly be a cessation of 
arms, and there should be lifted up, 
and roll over the battlefield, a won- 
drous hymn, united in by all the 
bands ; and as if no sooner were the 
notes of this magnificent music com- 
pleted than the battle should begin 
again, and the bands, separating, 
should go their several ways, to cheer 
their several squadrons. 

Paul has been arguing, up to this 
time, on the subject of the diverse 
gifts ; settling difficult questions and 
points of disagreement ; fending off, 
pushing aside, opposition. It is con- 
troversial all the way through. Sud- 
denly he stops the argument and 
illustration, and lifts up this mag- 
nificent descant upon love, running 
through the thirteen verses of the 
thirteenth chapter. And the moment 
it is over, he goes back to his duty 
again, and commences the contro- 
versial strain once more. 

1945. I Corinthians, XIII. — Ah ! the 
Thirteenth chapter of First Corin- 
thians is v/hat throws light upon every- 
thing. It is the painted window in the 
glorious old cathedral, through which 
the most splendid truths pour, in the 
most radiant colors. 

1946. Paul's Last Letter. — The 
Epistle to the Philippians is one of the 
tenderest and deepest and sweetest of 
Paul's letters. It was near the last, 
if not actually the last, of his writings ; 
and looking out of prison back on his 
career, and the stormy scenes of his 
life, this is his final word. This may 
be almost called the dying voice of 
Paul : and he never says a word about 
Sunday ; not a word about circum- 
cision, not a word about ordinances, 
government, dogma, doctrine. He 
speaks wholly of the inward life by 
which man is likened to the Lord 



Jesus Christ. That is the legacy 
breathed in his last hour. 

1947. Paul's Egoism. — Now comes 
the Book of Hebrews. We know not 
who its author is ; we know it was not 
Paul. You might just as well talk 
Choctaw and say that is the language 
of New England or Old England. The 
style of the Epistle to the Hebrews is 
impossible to Paul. There is but one 
place in which the writer says " I," 
and I think that is towards the close ; 
but in Paul's writings " I " stands out 
as thick as spears do in a battle — it is 
"I," "I." "I live, yet not I, but 
Christ liveth in me." There is a most 
imperial and superb egoism in Paul 
which is not offensive, simply because 
he had lost his sense of personality. 
" I am in Christ, and Christ is in me." 

1948. Influence of Noble Deeds. — 
This chapter of Hebrews turns upon 
the deeds of their noble men and 
women, or of men and women not 
noble, but made so by some single 
deed. They hung above the horizon 
of the Israelites an invisible influence, 
nevertheless the most potent. Even a 
harlot is not forgotten — Rahab, whose 
life was dedicated to sensuousness, yet 
who, on one impulse, dared to peril 
life and everything dear to life on the 
unseen future that had impressed her 
with being noble. As the roughest 
and rudest of all possible things car- 
ries in it the pearl, though but one, 
that one heroic deed shines through all 
the darkness of the ages, and Rahab 
is remembered when a million harlots 
are forgotten. 

1949. The Apocalypse. — What 
should we think of one who should 
go into the lobby of the Vatican to see 
the frescoes of Raphael, and take with 
him scales and rules, weighing out 
certain parts of the pigment, measur- 
ing other parts, and ciphering upon 
and estimating these pictures by weight 



THE BIBLE 



415 



and size, as if they were a mere mer- 
chantable commodity, applying to 
them rules that are infinitely below, 
and that have no relation to them. 
And yet, so men have been for gener- 
ations attempting to interpret this sub- 
lime, vague, but most glorious and 
useful drama, ciphering throughout 
the past as if it were a literal prophecy, 
and ciphering into the future as though 
it were a prophecy unfulfilled ; and 
attempting, by arithmetic, by historical 
interpretations, by various ingenious 
parallelisms or inferences or analogies, 
to obtain didactic meanings from it to 
suit their own schemes of thought. 

1950. Interpretation of Prophetic 
Visions. — The effect becomes ludi- 
crous when modern interpreters, not 
content with a disclosure of the ruling 
thought, attempt to transform the 
whole gorgeous picture into modern 
equivalents, to translate every sign and 
symbol into a literal fact. If men 
were to attempt with brick and mortar 
to build a picture of the auroral lights, 
it would scarcely be more absurd than 
the attempt to find modern equiva- 
lents for every part of the sublime 
Apocalypse of St. John. 

1951. The Book of Revelations. — 
You will sooner make the sunset con- 
form itself to any theory of arrange- 
ment than you will reduce this Book 
to any method of thought that is yet 
known. It is a drama, indicating the 
close of the long struggle between 
good and evil which has been and is 
a thread of human history. It is a 
drama which does not pretend to be 
symmetrical, or to have unity. It is 
like a great piece of music, filled with 
strange choruses and songs. It is full 
of swarming conflicts set off by stu- 
pendous images. It is a sublime Book 
that hangs in the future, giving assur- 
ance of the final triumph of goodness, 
of truth, of justice, and of love in the 



world ; and we must take it as a mag- 
nificent tableau, and not as a regu- 
lated philosophical statement, and 
still less as a history, either of the past 
or of the future. 

1952. Bible Study Needs Better In- 
struments. — There is a great deal 
more meaning in many of the pas- 
sages of the Bible than we can give to 
them. The fact is that many of the 
texts of Scripture kill sermons dead. 
A wise preacher skips the best texts. 
He cannot work them up. 

When mahogany was first intro- 
duced into Europe, there was not a 
carpenter shop in any kingdom that 
had tools highly tempered enough to 
work it. It broke every tool that 
there was, and new tools had to be 
made, of better steel, and steel of a 
higher temper. And our tools, with 
which we handle texts, are not of 
good enough material. We must 
have new ones with better material, 
and material more highly tempered. 

1953. The Bible Buried under 
Rubbish. — You know how it is with 
the cities of the East that are now be- 
ing exhumed. In Egypt they are 
digging down to old cities under cen- 
turies of accumulations of sand. In 
Assyria they are doing the same. 
Ancient Jerusalem lies forty feet be- 
low the level of the present city ; if 
you would walk the streets where the 
prophets walked you must go down 
through rubbish to get where they 
were. But no statue, or pyramid, or 
sphinx, or treasure sought was ever 
covered down with learning and other 
accumulations as the Word of God is. 
If you doubt it, read the commen- 
taries. 

1954. Annoyance by Commentators. 
— As sometimes, when we go to our 
work in summer, we are annoyed by 
swarms of insects that fill the air with 
murmurous buzz, and trouble the eye 



4i6 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



and the car, and offend every sense, 
so there are some passages in the 
Bible so infested by commentators, by 
controversialists, and theologians, and 
curious Christians, that one cannot 
approach them except through a 
swarm of buzzing associations which 
distract the reason, and pervert the 
judgment, and take away all the 
heart-enjoyment which they were 
meant to give. 

1955- The Bible not a Book of 
War. — It may become essential to 
collect various representations of 
truth, draw them up in battle array, 
and with them bear down on oppos- 
ing views and teachings ; but such a 
use of this book seems to me to be in- 
felicitous. It certainly is uncongenial 
to me. 

I have spent nearly forty years in 
the ministry, and during the early 
part of that period my work was more 
or less controversial. I was born not 
far from the time of the split between 
the Old and the New School Presby- 
terians. I was brought up in the 
gladiation of a theological seminary. 
You may think I do not know much 
about theology. You do not know 
how much I know about it, for I have 
tried to forget all that, and to recover 
from the scars and wounds inflicted 
by a controversial reading of the 
Bible. 

1956. Theological Transformation 
of the Bible. — A mother sends away 
her boy of nineteen or twenty. He 
goes out rollicking, a happy, rosy- 
cheeked boy, to his military school : 
the next time she sees him he is 
strapped tight ; he is weighted ; he is 
laden down with his clothes ; he has 
his epaulets on his shoulders ; and he 
stands as straight as a ramrod. That 
is the boy she knew in the cradle, and 
frolicking in the nursery, and who 
used to romp around the house, and 



who left her to go to school ; now he 
is a martinet. That boy is an illustra- 
tion of the Bible which has been made 
to be, in the drill which has been 
given to it by theology, utterly unlike 
its early free, natural self. 

1957. Conflict over the Bible 

There are many whose only thought 
of the New Testament is as of a mag- 
azine of artillery. There is no sweet- 
ness in texts, to their taste. They 
value them merely as clubs to be 
hewn for the conflict which they are 
waging. The wondrous beauty of the 
love of Christ, of his words them- 
selves, are but so much metal with 
which they forge swords and armor 
and breastplates as they go out against 
each other in theological controversy. 
The garden of the Lord, the exquisite 
beauty of the New Testament, is as if 
the wild boar of the forest had deso- 
lated it. On the very Tree of Life he 
whets his tusks, that he may go into 
belluine and savage warfare. 

1958. Combative Reading of the 
Bible. — There are many persons of 
combative tendencies, who read the 
Bible for ammunition, and dig out of 
it iron for balls. They read, and they 
find niter and charcoal and sulphur 
for powder. They read, and they find 
cannon. They read, and they make 
port-holes and embrasures. And if a 
man does not believe as they do they 
look upon him as an enemy, and let 
fly the Bible at him to demolish him. 
Reading the Bible thus promotes 
quarrels and controversies. 

1959. The Bible of Conflict. — How 
sad is that field from which battle has 
just departed I By as much as the 
valley was exquisite in its loveliness is 
it now sublimely sad in its desolation. 
Such to me is the Bible when a fight- 
ing theologian has gone through it. 

i960. The Bible not Dependent on 
any One of its Books. — The Word 



THE BIBLE 



417 



of God is composed of books, which, 
though written in different ages, have 
an interior unity ; but the setting aside 
of any book that is bound up in the 
Bible will not invalidate the others. 
We kno\T very well that Luther did 
not believe the Epistle of James was a 
canonical book. As for myself, I say 
that even if it should be proved that 
some of the books of the Bible are not 
authentic, and must be rejected — as I 
do not believe it will ; and that others, 
in the main correct, contain more or 
less errors which must be eliminated, 
it would not destroy the Bible for me, 
any more than to take a rotten joist 
from an imperfect place in a house 
would destroy the house. In taking 
out from the Bible whatever is false, 
you simply take out something that 
does not belong there. The Bible re- 
mains. 

ig5i. The Bible : Unity in Diversity. 
— I think one of the most interesting 
things in England is the Winchester 
Cathedral. It represents every order 
of Gothic architecture, from the old 
Saxon down to the latest develop- 
ments in this direction, running 
through four or five distinct periods. 
In one part of the building you see 
represented the most ancient, in an- 
other more modern, in another still 
more modern, and in another, the 
most modern Gothic architecture. 
The whole constitutes a magnificent 
pile. It represents several different 
schools, with hundreds of years be- 
tween them; but the peculiarities of 
these different schools are brought to- 
gether so that, although the individual 
elements in them are unlike, they 
compose a unit which is admirable, 
and serves the purposes of the church, 
at the same time that it is beautiful. 

So external unity in the books of 
the Bible is utterly wanting ; but in- 
teriorly they are one. That is, they 



all bear on the general questions of 
man's sinfulness, his duty, his right- 
eousness, his relations to God and 
eternity. They are uniform in that 
regard ; while in their outward char- 
acteristics they are very different one 
from another. 

1962. Doctrines of Inspiration, — 
When one departs from the old-time 
idea of inspiration of the Bible, and 
admits things in the body of Scripture 
to be erroneous, many persons brought 
up under the vague influence of the 
doctrine of plenary or verbal inspira- 
tion, feel that they are giving up the 
book ; but it is no more giving up the 
book than it would be giving up my 
right and title, if, having received a 
will from my father, making me heir 
of certain properties, I should find 
that his description of these properties 
was not accurate, and should acknowl- 
edge this to be a defect. If the house 
belonging to the estate was repre- 
sented as being one hundred feet by 
fifty feet, whereas it was only ninety- 
five feet by forty-eight feet, the sub- 
stantial thing would be there, in spite 
of the external errors in the statement. 
If your name should be spelled wrong, 
or bad grammar should be used, in 
the will, that would not invalidate it. 

1963. Permanence of God's Words. 
— There stands in the basement of the 
Louvre, in Paris, a collection of the 
statues of the Greek gods. When I 
first came among them, I was seized 
with an unexpected emotion. I 
seemed borne back to the days when 
these stood in their several temples, or 
upon open-air pedestals ; when men 
thought them to be receptacles of di- 
vinity, and offered up their reverential 
worship before them, — mere relics 
now, in many cases, of what had 
once been awe-inspiring. Nor could 
I well awake from the trance and re- 
alize the gulf of time between them 



4i8 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



and their worshipers, and the meaning 
of those revolutions in laws and reli- 
gious ideas and beliefs that had sepa- 
rated these marbles from the days of 
their glory, and cast them up in these 
later times, where, instead of faith, 
curiosity, and half-reverence, only 
cold, brilliant art-admiration lingered 
about their venerable forms. 

But if for these miserable memorials 
of a former glory — gods without a 
worshiper ; altars without priest or 
sacrifice ; divinities beggared, exiled, 
discrowned, and cast out of their 
spheres never to reascend — one ex- 
periences so strange an interest, how 
much he must experience for the im- 
perishable memorials which have 
come down upon the course of thou- 
sands of years, without infirmity or 
change — the Hebrew Bible ! 

1964. Biblical Criticism. — Suppose 
you have a package of twenty-five 
titles and deeds, and as you look 
them over you find among them the 
record of a journey to Androscog- 
gin, and you say, "That came here 
by accident," and throw it out ; and 
suppose your son, sitting by, should 
say, " Father, if that is not genuine, 
how do you know that the rest are ? " 
The fact that by mistake a paper that 
does not belong there gets into the 
bundle, does not destroy the validity 
of the papers that are in it which do 
belong there. Each paper stands on 
its own merits. And because you put 
a strap around the whole, they are not 
so connected that if you take some 
out those that are left are good for 
nothing. Binder's leather about the 
Bible docs not make all the books of 
of it so otie that if you impair the 
authority of any you impair the au- 
thority of the others. 

1965. Petty Criticisms. — The petty 
criticisms which peck at God's word, 
and are amazingly contemptible in the 



presence of this orient light which arose 
in twilight but waxed brighter and 
brighter towards the perfect day, ought 
to be the marvel and the wonder of men. 
What if there be anachronisms in the 
Bible ; mistakes in dates, stumblings 
of good men, worn out and wasted 
customs still embalmed? What if 
there should be imperfect laws per- 
mitted ? They are but fleeting ele- 
ments, and have their use in marking 
the stages of development by which 
the human intelligence rose from dark- 
ness into relative light, and the con- 
science from being soiled into relative 
purity, and a higher faith was being 
developed. 

Should I, if I had stood upon the 
Acropolis, and discovered that there 
were spiders in the great temple of 
the Parthenon, or that there was a 
leak in the roof, or that there was dust 
settled upon the cornices, blow up the 
building because I saw these specks in 
it ? Yet there are men who deride 
this grandest collection of the evolu- 
tions of human consciousness towards 
the highest ideal. They have no con- 
ception of the grandeur of this move- 
ment, nor of the grandeur of its 
results. 

1966. Seminal Character of the 
Bible. — The very imperfections of the 
Bible, as we consider them, are really 
such as might be expected in any 
work divinely inspired as the seed of 
divine life in man. They are in har- 
mony with the other works of God. 
A book intended to be planted like a 
seed in the human mind ought not to 
have the finish of one intended for 
temporary use. Polish brings limita- 
tion. A book exactly adapted for use 
in New York to-day will be of no use 
whatever in Oregon next century. 

1967. Men's Perplexities to be 
Worked Out. — Many people say, 
"Why does not the Bible settle a 



DOUBT AND BELIEF 



419 



great many points which are perplex- 
ing to men?" You might as well 
say, "Why did not God make a 
garden behind every man's house, 
where all desirable plants should 
come up of their own accord, where 
weeds should be banished, and where 
everything should be in perfect order, 
without giving the owner any trouble ? " 
It would be just as reasonable to say, 
" What is the use of making things so 
that we should have to work in order 
to get them ? " But that is God's cre- 
ative idea. 

1968, All Scripture Profitable. — I 
have sometimes had persons ask me, 
" What portions of the Bible are most 
delightful to you?" I am reminded 
of the answer to a question once pro- 
pounded to Daniel Webster. He was 



a great reader of Shakespeare's plays, 
and was asked which he liked best. 
He replied, instantly, "The one that I 
read last." It is very much so with 
Scripture. That portion which distils 
as the dew from heaven upon the 
thirsty soul, seems for the time the 
most precious of all Scripture ; and 
which part it is, will depend very 
much upon the need of the man's own 
feeling, or heart-life. 

1969. Man and God. — Sink the 
Bible to the bottom of the ocean, and 
man's obligations to God would be un- 
changed. He would have the same 
path to tread, only his lamp and his 
guide would be gone ; he would have 
the same voyage to make, only his 
compass and chart would be over- 
board. 



XX XIII . DOUBT AND BELIEF 



1970. Indifference and Unbelief. — 
How many are there marching on 
now in the Sahara of indifference and 
in the wilderness of unbelief! How 
many are there without God and with- 
out hope in this world ! What shall 
become of them ? 

197 1. Cheerlessness of Doubt. — 
There lies the island of Newfound- 
land, where the two currents meet — 
the cold, frigid waters of the north, 
made up of dissolved icebergs, and 
the warm Gulf Stream of the south. 
The cold airs from the north chill the 
moist, warm airs from the south ; and 
the result is fogs, fogs, fogs. New- 
foundland and the adjacent waters 
are almost constantly covered with 
mists which are nigh impenetrable to 
the rays of the sun. There are any 
number of human Newfoundlands — 
men who are in a dreary, chilly fog 
all the time, without the sun of right- 
eousness shining upon them. Thou- 
sands of souls there are that are 



wrnpped in the cheerless, sunless ex- 
perience which doubt breeds. 

1972. Eras of Doubt. — The old 
pastures lie fallow for ten years with- 
out plow or seed. When the farmer 
at last wakes up to root out the old 
turf, and turn it bottom side up, what 
a perishing there is of roots ! What a 
perishing there is of the old inhabit- 
ants of the globe ! What absolute 
waste it is ! But it is waste that is lay- 
ing the foundation for a new crop, and 
for a better and healthier one. When 
the minds of men that have been fol- 
lowing institutions and particular me- 
chanical methods are broken loose 
from them by the assertion of some- 
thing newer and higher, the first process 
is apt to be a breaking loose from the 
old without taking root in anything 
else. Then comes the era of doubt. 

1973. Necessity of Differing Beliefs. 
— The attempt to make all men see 
and feel the same things is just as 
preposterous as it would be to make 



420 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



the mark of one man's foot in the 
sand, and attempt to compel every- 
body else's foot to fit that mark 
exactly. Stakes have been driven, 
flames have been kindled, racks have 
been turned, and blood has flowed 
out by Amazons, in that which nature 
abhors, and the race abhors, and God 
abiiors — the attempt to make all men 
believe in the same things in the same 
way. It has been sought to run men in 
moulds, as it were, so that they should 
come out as dollars from a die. But 
men are made on the principle of in- 
finite and eternally increasing varia- 
tions. And beliefs, though they agree 
generically, vary specifically — and 
must and will do so. 

1974. Obstructions to Truth. — 
Voltaire was not a sceptic of true re- 
ligion ; for he never saw it. He was 
an unbeliever in religion as he saw it 
organized and before him. It seemed 
as though his hand was turned against 
the spirit of the Lord. It was not. 
He was removing the obstructions that 
overlaid the soil ; and if there was to 
be a new growth, it was necessary 
that in some way these things should 
be removed that had ceased to be 
a help, and were become really an ob- 
struction to human development. 

1975' Poor Remedy for Scepticism. 
— The folly of that remedy which 
men propose is made very plain. 
Those who have not an understanding 
of God's way, and cannot tell what 
the signs of the times portend, often, 
seeing this progress and that develop- 
ment, think the remedy is to go back 
to the old forms and institutions. 
Screw up your machine a little tighter. 
" They have been liberalizing a little ; 
but now," say the deacon, the elder 
and the minister, grave, good and 
ignorant, " we must go back to the 
old days." That is the best way to 
get over ophthalmia — put your eyes 



out, or never let them see anything, 
or never use them in any way. So 
they are more particular about ordi- 
nances, about days, and about their 
theology ; and if they don't believe 
that, they bolt it — swallow it whole ! 

1976. Imagination and Belief. — The 
most wonderful work of art in all 
ages, doubtless, was that of Phidias — 
the famous Zeus, or Jupiter. No 
artist has ever equaled Phidias ; 
probably none ever will ; for we shall 
probably never have an age again 
whose deepest life will be expressed 
by the instrumentality of art, and only 
such ages can produce such artists as 
Greece had before Christ, and Italy 
afterwards. The wonderful statue 
which Phidias made was wrought of 
ivory and of gold. It was a carved 
figure sitting upon a throne with ma- 
jestic air, holding in its left hand a 
statue of Victory, and in its right 
hand the scepter of Empire. So vast 
was this extraordinary work, that, 
sitting in the chair of state, it still 
towered forty feet in height. Into no 
other figure and face had art ever 
thrown such astonishing majesty. 
Men made pilgrimages to see it. He 
was counted happy who had seen, 
and he was counted unfortunate who 
died without seeing, the Phidian Jove. 
It was placed at the end of the tem- 
ple ; and historians say that if it had 
risen up it would have carried away 
the roof and the ceiling, so tall was it. 
Before it was stretched a purple cur- 
tain to hide it from common observa- 
tion ; but on appointed festival days 
the crowds of citizens — excited by an 
uninstructed religious fervor, wild with 
exhilarating dances, odorous with the 
fragrance of costly perfumes through 
whose smoke they passed, as censers 
and altars shed them forth at every 
corner, — in multitudes along every 
square drew near to the temple ; and 



DOUBT AND BELIEF 



421 



now, when sacrifices were made, and 
the vast throng were hushed with 
silent expectation, at a signal the 
priests drew back the purple curtain, 
and the vast statue, white as snow and 
yellow as gold, shone forth with such 
amazing luster that the crowd were 
subdued to tears ; some fainted, some 
were caught into a nervous furor that 
was counted an inspiradon ; and not 
one was there among them who, for 
the moment, doubted the reality of 
the divine Olympian. 

And yet this was a statue. It spoke 
not a word. No heart throbbed 
there. No light waked in those eyes. 
It was a mere idol, that thought not, 
moved not, felt not, but sat silent 
amid ages — silent as the elements of 
which it was made — the cast-off tusks 
of elephants in African forests — silent 
as gold buried in the mountains. Not 
one of all that throng but had more 
life, more intelligence, more scope 
and magnitude of existence than that 
majestic lie before which they cast 
themselves down, the slaves of their 
own imaginations ! 

1977. Sincerity and Correctness of 
Belief. — In regard to the truths of the 
physical economy of the globe, does 
it make any difference what a man 
believes ? Would it make any differ- 
ence to a machinist whether he thought 
lead was as good for tools as steel ? 
Would it make any difference to a man 
in respect to the industries of life if he 
thought that a triangle was as good as 
a circular wheel in machinery ? In all 
material things, the more sincere you 
are, if you are right, the better ; but 
the more sincere you are, if you are 
wrong, the worse. In either case, sin- 
cerity is the mallet that drives home 
the excellence or the mischief. 

It is only when we come to moral 
grounds that men begin to urge with 
any considerable degree of confidence 



the superiority of sincerity to correct- 
ness of belief. It is not until they 
come to religious truths that men be- 
gin to say, " It does not make much 
difference what a man believes, if only 
he believes it." 

1978. The Power of Doubt. — If a 
man tells me that a coin which I 
have is silver, and I think it is silver, 
I am easy ; but if he says to me, 
" Are you sure that it is silver ? Are 
you used to counterfeits ? Do you 
know anything about them ? Have 
you looked into this thing ? Do you 
know that that is all right ? I do not 
say that it is not ; it may be all right ; 
but do you know that it is ? " I can- 
not get it out of my mind that there is 
a doubt about its being a good silver 
coin until I can ascertain the facts in 
regard to it. For the time being he 
has broken my faith in it. 

And the moment you have broken 
the absolute faith of a man in any 
truth or doctrine so that he doubts it, 
it has no more power over him. 

1979. Danger in Abandoning Be- 
liefs. — It is not difficult for a man to 
unsettle his beliefs ; but the power to 
again lay the foundation of beliefs, to 
fashion them, and to systematize them, 
is the rarest that can be conceived 
of. . . . It requires a comprehensive- 
ness, an insight, and a special kind of 
wisdom, singular among all the differ- 
ent wisdoms. It requires a patience 
of investigation, and then a long ripen- 
ing of knowledge, such as not one man 
in an age has given to him. It is far 
more likely that there will be another 
Homer, than that there will be another 
Augustine ; that there will be another 
Shakespeare, than that there will be 
another Calvin ; that there will be an- 
other Milton, than that there will be 
another Arminius ; that there will be 
another Dante, than that there will be 
another Edwards. When, therefore, 



42-i 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



men think that to unsettle their belief 
is not a perilous experiment, they are 
very greatly mistaken ; for it is a gulf 
darker and more dangerous, perhaps, 
than any other into which a man can 
precipitate himself. 

1980. Emptiness of Unbelief. — Un- 
belief is the most unmanly thing that 
a man can boast of— not believing in 
truth, in all the great thoughts that 
belong to the universe, in men, in 
women, in virtue, in heroism. To rest 
in unbelief is to be like a tenement 
house that is abandoned by the tenant, 
and given up to the rats and vermin. 
The emptiest, poorest, most unmanly 
of all conditions, is that of a man 
without belief in anything. 

1981. An Unanchored Soul. — When 
a ship is sailing, the anchor is of no 
use ; but when the ship would lie still, 
it is the anchor that holds it. It is not 
alone a storm that requires the good 
offices of an anchor. In the calmness 
of the harbor, a ship needs it. In the 
fairest weather, when winds arc as 
gentle as if a dove's wings had pro- 
duced them, a ship will still drift. 
The silent current, the soft palms of 
the tiniest ripples that plash against 
the sides, gradually push her along ; 
and she will ground upon the Hats, or 
strike upon the shore, or grate upon 
the harsh ledges. So long as a ship 
is under headway, the rudder can 
hold her to her course ; but as soon as 
she is sheltered, and would fain lie 
still, she must have an anchor. 

The soul is like a ship. So long as 
it is moving with strong impulsion, it 
liolds its course easily. When earnest 
impulses cease, then, unless something 
holds the soul steadfast, it drifts; and 
drifting is far more dangerous to a soul 
than to a ship. It drifts into doubt ; 
and out of doubts come morbid im- 
pulses ; and out of morbid impulses 
come reactions of the most dangerous 



kind. The soul, thus bestead, suffers, 
and despairs, and sometimes is driven 
up by tides and winds, in some vernal 
or autumnal night, so far on the sand 
that the waters, once gone, never come 
so high again. It lies wrecked. 

1982. Scepticism, Minus and Plus. 
— There are two kinds of scepticism ; 
one is measured by the mathematical 
sign of jiuniis, that doubts and disbe- 
lieves, and goes back, and back : and 
the other is designated by the mathe- 
matical sign o{ piits, which disbelieves 
in old forms, because they are not 
large enough ; because they are not 
fruitful enough ; because they are not 
ripe enough — and goes forward. The 
scepticism minus is deteriorating ; but 
the scepticism plus is ennobling. If 
there is to be change and growth, 
there must be in every generation 
times when men shall doubt the past 
in order to build larger. 

1983. The Sceptic. — A sceptic, of- 
tentimes, is nothing but a man finding 
his way to a higher level. He is, or 
may be, a man who is forsaking rub- 
bish, with the object of getting hold of 
the substance. He is a man who will 
not eat hay, but wants fresh grass. 
He wants to be led by the side of still 
waters and green pastures. 

Right in front of my house I have a 
beech tree. All winter long, because 
its leaves were so beautiful during the 
summer, it holds on to them. In Jan- 
uary they are there ; in February they 
are there ; in March they are there. 
In May the tree begins to grow, and 
one after the other the old leaves be- 
gin to drop. There is nothing that 
will undo the old dead leaf that has no 
juice in it, so quickly as growth in the 
tree. When men are growing, the old 
leaves begin to drop off. It is not a 
sign of decadence ; it is a sign that 
summer is coming, that the tree is 
growing larger. 



FEAR AND HOPE 



423 



1984. Sensibility to the Divine. — 
I sat last summer sometimes for hours 
in the dreamy air of the mountains, 
and saw, over against the Twin 
Mountain House, the American 
aspen, of which the forests there are 
full. I saw all the coquetries and 
blinkings of that wonderful little tree 
— the witch, the fairy-tree, of the 
forest. As I sat tliere, when there 
was not a cloud moving, when there 
was not a ripple on the glassy surface 
of the river, when there was not a 
grain of dust lifted, when everything 
was still — dead still — right over 
against me was that aspen-tree ; and 
there was one little leaf quivering and 
dancing on it. It was so nicely poised 
on its long, slender stem that it knew 
when the air moved. Though I did 
not know it, though the dust did not 
know it, and though the clouds did 
not know it, that leaf knew it ; and it 
quivered and danced. 

Now, it requires only sensibility in 
us to detect physical qualities, or 
social elements, or moral attributes, 
if we have the corresponding at- 
tributes. We detect all qualities by 
the sensibility in us of corresponding 
qualities which reveal them to us. 
And he who has largely the divine 
element will be able to recognize the 
Divine existence. It is the fool that 
says in his heart, " There is no God." 

1985. Doubt and Faith. — Doubt 
and faith are born twins, and you 
have no right to separate them. 



They ought to recognize each other. 
Doubt of things past is simply clear- 
ing tiie way to a brighter and a nobler 
future ; and since with the spirit of 
knowledge old things are passing 
away, let us thank God, and only ask 
that the doubters may become the 
new men of a generation of faith. 

1986. Times of Vision. — Doubts 
and scepticisms every man, whose 
mind is active, and who is observing, 
has, more or less, in his lower hours ; 
and they dampen and hinder him : 
but at the other times he looks beyond 
the expanse of this life, and over the 
horizon, and he has a sense of the 
certainty and nearness of God. His 
whole soul adjudicates. Then it is 
that he should take his reckoning, fix 
his landmarks and steer by them. 

When a man goes over any un- 
trodden mountain, on some hilltop he 
looks forward and sees how the whole 
land lies ; and he singles out some 
vast rock, some tall pine, or some 
prominent point, as a landmark ; then 
he goes down into the champaign, 
and the way is no longer open like a 
map before him. He is lost ; but 
still he keeps the general direction ; 
and by and by, through a little open- 
ing, he sees yonder rock or pine or 
point; and he says, "Ah! that is 
what I saw," and travels on, and 
emerges again. . . . Not when you 
are in the valley can you tell which 
way to travel, unless you have learned 
it on the top of the hill. 



XXXIV. FEAR AND HOPE 



1987. Fear. — Not to fear, where 
there is occasion is as great a weak- 
ness as to fear unduly, without reason. 
God planted fear in the soul as truly 
as he planted hope or courage. Fear 
is a kind of bell, or gong, which rings 
the mind into quick life and avoidance 
upon the approach of danger. 



1988. Value of Fear. — Fear is 
eminently a moral tonic. It is 
universal in human society. It works 
in unperceived and covert forms in- 
cessantly, in all our physical and 
social elements. It incites enterprise. 
Want produces fear of recurring 
want. Men learn to be industrious 



424 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



for fear of the suffenng that conies 
from indolence. Men, because they 
fear pain, avoid the causes of disease. 
It works, therefore, to make all 
physical economies prompt, wise, 
beneficial ; and in low measures is 
that tonic of thoughtfulness which 
awakens men to watchfulness in 
regard to trusts reposed in them. 

And certainly, as it works in every 
part of human society in things 
relating to physical thrift and social 
advantage and augmentation, it does 
not cease to act when it rises to yet 
more important spheres, and has 
charge of men's moral life. There it 
warns them of dangers, and stimulates 
them to enterprise and development. 
It becomes even more important, just 
in the ratio of its application to the 
higher faculties and the higher feel- 
ings. 

1989. Fear, a Pain, — In its own 
proper action, fear is pain. It is in 
the nature of a spur. It is the sharp 
prick of feeling, designed to wake up 
a slumbering faculty, or a slumbering 
mind. It acts usually with reference 
to something in the future. If fear 
even has to do with retrospect, it is on 
account of consequences in the future. 
For the sphere of fear is in that which 
is coming, always. Its essential char- 
acteristic is a certain painfulness in 
the mind, which rouses up that mind 
to look out and see and understand 
danger. 

1990. Results of Vice, Lessons of 
Virtue. — Though a man's reason may 
be the steed on which he rides to 
industry, fear is the lash that makes 
the steed run. Hunger, rags, sick- 
ness, and pain, arising from vice and 
improvidence, are a perpetual lesson. 
The best church, I think, in this 
whole city is the poorhouse at Flat- 
bush. Where you want to teach 
young people good morals and thrift. 



one of the best churches of this wliole 
region is the Tombs prison in New 
York. 

1 991. Fear, but a Restraining 
Agency. — Convicts in a prison who 
are in insurrection, and have burst 
open bars and locks, and are rushing 
out for their liberty — rush upon serried 
ranks of bayonets: "One step fur- 
ther and you are dead men, every 
one of you." They draw back, they 
stop trying to run away; but they do 
not become patriots, they do not be- 
come law-keepers and virtuous men 
on that account. They are simply re- 
strained from the vagabondism of in- 
iquity, that is all. If you wish merely 
to restrain men, then fear will do. 
But it is the lowest agency. It has a 
necessary office, but it is ignoble, and 
it may almost be said to be the hang- 
man of the divine government. 

1992. Fear, Corroding. — It is not the 
revolution that destroys machinery, 
but the friction. Worry is rust upon 
the blade. Fear secretes acids ; but 
love and trust yield sweet juices. 

1993. Fear, a Noxious Element. — 
Fear, existing as a pure feeling, is not 
only a torment, but a poison. There 
is nothing that goads the fiber so. 
There is nothing that so deteriorates 
physical quality and health itself. 

1994. Morbid Seeking of Trouble. — 
Men get into a state, sometimes, in 
which they rather want anxiety and 
trouble. As poisons become stimu- 
lants, so these corrosions and cares 
not unfrequently become almost in- 
dispensable. There are many people 
who not only suffer, but seek suffer- 
ing. If you present the bright side to 
them, they do not want to see that. 
They are in a minor key, and they 
want everything to wail. They are 
very much like what are called " weep- 
ing" trees. They have a downward 
tendency ; and if you undertake to 



FEAR AND HOPE 



425 



make them straight, you break them. 
They are determined to be weeping- 
willows. There are many people of 
whom it may be said that they are 
never happy unless they are misera- 
ble. 

1995. Folly of Fear. — When I was 
in the West, and traveled on horse- 
back, I used to dread, all day long, 
the fords. I had a peculiar fear of 
them, arising from an early experience 
in which I was twice swept away, and 
came near losing my life. I was cour- 
ageous in most things, but I dreaded 
fords because they seemed so dark 
and pokerish. In the mud rivers of 
the West one never knew when the 
ground might shift, nor what condi- 
tion a certain ford would be in when 
he got to it. For instance, I would 
go through White River all right, and 
Blue River would be back of me, but 
there would be Eel River to come, 
and I could not get there till five or 
six o'clock in the afternoon. That 
was the worst ford. (The next one 
was always the worst!) At last I 
would come to it, and I would brace 
myself up and go across ; but instead 
of there being a raging, foaming tor- 
rent, such as I had imagined, the 
water might be so low that the horse 
would not go knee-deep in any place. 
Then I would be mad because it was 
not deep, after I had been fretting all 
day about it ! When I came back on 
the other side, I would derive no com- 
fort from the recollection that I had 
lately crossed with so little difficulty. 
" To be sure," I would say, " the ford 
was not deep then, but it may be deep 
now. How do I know but it has been 
raining there?" When I would get 
to that ford again, I would find that 
it was no worse than it was before, 
and would laugh at myself. I never 
got any wiser. I was always afraid 
of a ford. 



1996. Heavenly View of Earthly 
Dangers. — I remember, once, when I 
was threading a Western forest, that 
as, at twilight, 1 came towards a little 
opening, I saw a man lurking on the 
edge of the forest, with a rifle drawn at 
me. Although I was a really brave 
man, my blood ran cold. There I was, 
sitting up on the horse, a fair mark for 
a man that was standing and taking 
deadly aim at me ; and I was at a 
great disadvantage. 1 did not laugh, 
for I had not got over my shock, when 
I came up to the spot and found, in- 
stead of a man with a rifle, only a 
tree with a branch pointing towards 
me ; but afterwards I laughed, to 
think what I had been so frightened 
at, and what a shock it sent through 
me. 

When men get to heaven, and find 
what many of those things were which 
stood aiming at them in this life ; when 
they find what sort of make-believe 
dangers those were which threatened 
them, I think they will laugh. And 
we shall look back on the vision of 
life, and all its fantastic imaginings, 
with wonder and gladness — with sor- 
row for ourselves, but with joy and 
gratitude to God, who brought us 
through the dangers of the way, and 
finally saved us. 

1997. Fear and Hope. — "All things 
will turn out right." And so, while 
fear says, " It will not," hopefulness 
says, " It will." Fear throws twi- 
light ; hope brings sunrise. Fear is 
miasmatic and deadening : hope is 
better than quinine ; it is tonic not 
only, but illuminates and lifts men up 
above the line of depression. It is an 
element, not only in the case of the 
individual, but in all social relations 
and in society itself. It stands over 
against fear and anxiety and de- 
spondency. It calls to itself patience, 
and its color is bright. 



426 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



iggS. Hope and Patience. — Hope 
brings joy ; it irradiates the present 
and makes trials, struggles, tempta- 
tions, defeats, all radiant. It is not 
only an active state, but under certain 
circumstances it is a stale that beds 
itself in or is upheld by the condition of 
patience, as if patience were a candle- 
stick and hope were the candle. It is 
looking at things in the future in a 
bright and cheerful light, the light of 
happiness. You can never define a 
fundamental emotional quality. All 
you can do is to describe it. 

iggg. Hope Cures Weariness. — 
When days have been oppressed for 
long by bitter storms and high winds, 
and men are weary of waiting for fair 
weather ; at last, in the shifting of the 
wind, there comes one single spot of 
blue. It is enough. The storm has 
grown thin, and that little spot of blue 
is the prophet of the clearing off. If 
hours yet delay, and remaining rains 
descend, I can wait through the storm 
— only let me see the blue sky be- 
yond. I can wait beyond the storm 
of time — only give me faith that I 
shall not find Moloch, that I shall 
have Love enthroned with power, and 
redeeming Love adequate to the re- 
construction of a universe. 

2000. The Hopeful View. — When 
a leaf drops and dies, it goes down to 
mingle with the ground. When moss 
falls off, it disappears. Everything in 
nature, as it decays, hides itself. And 
so it should be in human life. All 
the ten thousand decaying imperfec- 
tions in society we are as soon as pos- 
sible to forget and cast under foot. 
We are to accustom ourselves to look 
chiefly at that which is innocent, and 
beautiful, and aspiring, and in which 
arc tiic possibilities of education. 

2001. Experience and Hope. — E.\- 
perience corrects hope. Hope sees 
everything in a dazzling air, that does 



not dctinc. Experience defines things, 
limits them, and reveals them exactly 
in their forms and proportions. 

2002. Reason for Hope. — The cri- 
terion of hopefulness in any case, is 
not a certain position or relation of a 
man's conduct and character to a 
moral standard, useful as that is, and 
indispensable for some other purposes ; 
but the criterion of hopefulness in 
every man's case is the openness of 
his soul to Divine influence, and its 
susceptibility to change under that in- 
fluence. 

The value and excellence of the 
photographer's plate which is hidden 
within the camera does not consist in 
what it is, but upon its susceptibility 
when the object-glass of the camera 
is open to that light which streams 
upon it. If it is unprepared, and is 
like the common glass, all beauty 
might sit before it, and no change 
would be produced by the streaming 
of light. The glass might be as good 
in the first case as in the second, with 
the exception that, wiien it is prejjared, 
the photographer's glass reveals the 
impression of beauty made upon it by 
the light. 

2003. Cheer of Hope. — One will 
work longer and harder, and with far 
less fatigue, upon hope and cheer, 
than upon anxious and conscientious 
motive. Not that anxiety in a low 
mixture, and conscientiousness, are to 
be at a discount, but it makes a great 
deal of difference which of these 
things is the daily food. Eat con- 
science, and you will be lean. Eat 
hope, and you will be fat. 

2004. The Future for Hope. — If I 
am only that which I have been, I 
am of all men most miserable. I am 
no better than a leaf, no better than 
the bug that is on it. 

2005. Forethought. — Looking for- 
ward is not wrong ; but a paiyiful fore- 



FAITH 



427 



looking is. Pain and sorrow in a 
moderate degree are salutary ; but 
they must be derived from the present. 
The future belongs to hope, and not 
to fear. No man has a right to con- 
vert the outlying future into a storm- 



ground, and draw in upon himself its 
chills and blasts. It does no good. 
It does much harm. The past be- 
longs to Gratitude and Regret ; the 
present to Contentment and Work ; 
the future to Hope and Trust. 



XXXV. FAITH 



2006. Prayer for an Uplifting. — Lift 
Thou up our thoughts this morning, 
that, broken-winged, lie upon the 
ground, or that crawl when they 
should fly. Intone our voices this 
morning, that instead of speaking in 
sighs, and with tears, we may speak 
with joy and rejoicing. 

2007. The Man Without Faith. — 
What a fly is whose head is cut ofi", 
that having no steering power, and, 
using its wings and legs, whirls round 
and round, preliminary to dying, that 
a man is who has lost his faith. He 
is a headless insect. 

2008. Faith is Trust. — I go into the 
wilderness of the Adirondacks. I know 
nothing of the path over the mountains, 
through the valleys, or along the lakes 
and rivers. But an old guide takes me 
under his convoy. I discharge every 
sense of responsibility. I am perfectly 
at rest. I believe in his fidelity. I 
am sure of his knowledge. 

I go to Europe ; and no sooner do 
I get out of the harbor than I give the 
care of the ship to the captain. I am 
content that the engineer below shall 
take care of his share, and that the 
captain and crew upstairs shall take 
care of their share. I have enough to 
do to take care of myself, and I let 
the voyage go forward, trusting and 
leaning on others. 

If I go into a campaign under an 
able general in whom I have an en- 
thusiastic trust, I obey him implicitly. 
No matter what he wants done, I do 
it without questioning. 



Do you not know how it is with 
httle children, with what absolute 
trust they look up at father and mother 
in their love and faith ? 

Now, there is a trust of which these 
examples are simply illustrations. 
There is a trust which is higher than 
that which any man can put in a fel- 
low-man. There is a belief in the Di- 
vine love and compassion for us, not 
on account of our excellence, but on 
account of the fact that we are intelli- 
gent and immortal beings. This is 
the belief that the Apostle calls 
" faith." 

2009. Trust without Knowledge. — 
There is a man in New York whose 
earnings amount to only a dollar, a 
dollar and a half, or two dollars a day. 
He buys little notions here and there, 
and sells them here and there. His 
business is as big to him as Astor's 
is to Astor. It occupies his whole 
thought. On some fatal day he makes 
a mistake, and this leads to other mis- 
takes, and soon he finds himself nearly 
swamped. He is in great perplexity 
and distress. His entire fortune (a 
fortune is a fortune, whether it is five 
dollars or five million dollars) is going. 
His means of hvelihood are disappear- 
ing. He does not know what he is 
going to do. A wealthy man hears 
about his trouble, and says to him, 
" Look here, my friend, you last sum- 
mer did a kindness to my wife and 
family in the country. You recollect 
that circumstance on the lake?" 
•'Oh, it was your family, was it?" 



428 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



" Yes ; my wife told mc about it ; I 
hoped I would have a chance to re- 
pay you ; so do not trouble yourself 
about this matter. I will see you out 
of your embarrassment. You shall 
not suffer. I will put you where you 
will be better off than you were be- 
fore." 

The man goes into the shop, and 
says, " I don't see how he is going to 
do it. It is a mystery to me where 
the money is coming from. He has 
undertaken my case, but I can't see 
how he is going to get me out of my 
difficulty ; I hope he will ; but I would 
like to see how he is going to do it." 
I think a man would be a fool that 
under such circumstances made his 
trust to depend on his knowledge. 

20IO. Universal Application of 
Faith. — Men have such a narrow view 
of what faith is that they look for it 
as one would look for a diamond ; 
whereas they should look for it as 
treasure. Treasure may be precious 
stones, or gold, or raiment, or fragrant 
woods ; treasure is a hundred things : 
diamond is but one. So faith is not a 
special, single thing, as many people 
make it. It does not apply to rehgion 
alone, but to all the departments of 
life. It is simply such a carriage of 
the soul as lifts it into the realm of the 
invisible, so that the man hves by his 
higher faculties, rather than by his 
lower. Even in the most practical 
matters, that man succeeds best who 
has the most of this element. The 
difference between a merchant-prince 
and a petty trader is that the trader 
can work only as far as he sees, while 
he whom we call the merchant-prince 
disdains to stop at what he can see and 
handle, but goes beyond and deals 
with the relations of things, and antic- 
ipates results, and taking into account 
time, and space, and quality, and 
quantity, and seasons, and races, and 



latitudes, he makes the whole earth 
minister to his need. This is com- 
mercial faith. 

201 1. The Evidence of Things not 
Seen. — The Christian man knows that 
he is but a stranger and pilgrim ; and 
he comforts himself, as he goes through 
the wilderness, thinking of the home 
towards which he is traveling. And 
he weaves tapestries, and paints pic- 
tures, and carves various creations. 
Living, as he does, by faith, and not 
merely by sight, his imagining, his 
picture-painting, his idealizing, his 
holy revery, are filling the great empty 
heavens with all conceivable beauty. 
And what if it be evanescent ? So is 
the wondrous frost-picture on the win- 
dow ; but is it not beautiful and worth 
having ? So is the summer dew upon 
the flower ; but is it not renewed night 
by night ? And faith is given to man 
to lift him above the carnal, the dull, 
the sodden, and to enable him to con- 
ceive of things beyond that to which 
any earthly realization has yet ever 
attained. 

2012. God Transcends Knowledge. 
— I know God so that I walk with him 
as with a companion; I whisper to 
him, I believe that he imparts thoughts 
to me and feelings, and yet when you 
ask me: "Can you describe him? 
Can you make an inventory of his at- 
tributes ? " I cannot. I thank God 
he so transcends anything we know 
of him that God is unknowable. Peo- 
ple say, " Some may believe this, but 
can you prove it?" Suppose I were 
to have said in my youthful days to 
the woman of my choice, my honored 
wife, "I love you," and she handed 
me a slate and pencil and said, " Be 
kind enough to demonstrate that, will 
you ? " She would not have been my 
wife if she had ! 

2013. The Mount of Vision. — This 
summer many parties went to the 



FAITH 



429 



summit of Mount Washington, when 
the sun was very bright on all below ; 
and they were enveloped in clouds, 
and saw nothing. So many go out of 
worldly prosperity up to the Mount of 
Vision, and see nothing, being without 
faith, without hope, and without 
divine insight. There were other par- 
ties that went to the summit of Mount 
Washington, when the clouds lay low 
beneath, and it was raining ; and men 
laughed at them ; but when they had 
ascended, they found the top of the 
mountain serene and clear, so that 
they looked over all the wide lands, 
and saw the storms emptying them- 
selves below them. In the pure ether 
they stood and looked down upon that 
which had clouded their way up 
thither. And thus to the child of God 
permission is given to go up to the 
mountain top and look down upon the 
trouble and sorrow of this world. 

2014. Growing Views of God. — As 
when men stand and look into the 
heavens with the naked eye they see 
some three thousand stars ; as with a 
glass of certain power they may see 
some ten or twenty thousand, and as 
with a larger glass they may see still 
more, penetrating to the infinite depths 
of space, so the human mind has been 
such that at first it could see a little of 
the nature of God, then a little more, 
then a little more, and so on, with a 
power of vision that has increased 
clear down to the present time. 

2015. Uncertain Guides. — Upon the 
tops of our churches which have 
steeples they put weathercocks, that 
run their noses around hither and 
thither with the wind the whole year. 
You can tell by our churches which 
way the wind blows. But I have 
taken notice that while these weather- 
cocks revolve, there is an iron rod on 
which they are fastened that stands 
pointing, in storm and sunshine, by 



night and by day, straight up towards 
where God lives. Men are weather- 
cocks in human affairs, and we are 
apt to look at them, and not to see the 
heaven-pointing iron finger. Men 
that look only at these weathercocks 
are alwa\s shifting in their moods and 
expectations. If we would but look 
higher than these, to Him that lets the 
winds blow and holds them in his 
hands, we should not be subject to 
such mutations, such fears, such ex- 
pectations of disasters, such troubles. 

2016. Power of Inspiration. — When 
Napoleon's army were crossing the 
Alps, and the heavy artillery was 
being dragged by the men, their 
strength seemed actually to give out. 
Napoleon, who was with them, ordered 
the bands to sound the charge ; and 
the moment the inspiring tones of the 
music were heard the soldiers were 
filled with new strength, and up went 
the wheels, and they overcame what 
would otherwise have been insur- 
mountable obstacles. Energized by 
this method adopted through the fore- 
sight of their general, they were 
enabled to do things from which in- 
dividually and collectively they would 
have shrunk without such leadership. 
Now, it is possible for men to do and 
to bear a great many things, if they 
have the right help of inspiration 
when needed, 

2017. Trust, in Time of Distress. 
— When a man is Christ's, and real- 
izes it, he trusts him implicitly. When 
the bishop of Geneva passed under a 
cloud of detraction, in 1600, he utterly 
refused to allow himself to be cleared 
by his friends, or to take any notice 
whatever of the slanders; "For," 
said he, " I am Christ's ; he knows it ; 
and if he can afford to have me under 
a cloud, surely I can afford it. When- 
ever he wants me to be in the light 
again, he knows how to bring me 



43° 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



there ; and my business is to be 
patient under the administration of 
his providence." When the day of his 
clearance came at last, he would per- 
mit no celebration of it ; he would 
permit no rejoicing in his presence : 
he simply said, "It is a thing of the 
Lord. He has done what was best. 
I am his, and I wish to be disposed 
of as seems best in his sight, and not 
in mine." In a case Hke that there is 
an end of care. 

2018. Steadfastness of Faith. — It 
is said of one of Napoleon's mar- 
shals, that a bomb fell so near him, as 
he was writing a communication to 
Napoleon, that when it exploded it 
threw dirt all over his paper, and that 
he said, " I don't need any sand to 
blot this with now," so great was his 
coolness ; but most men are so excit- 
able and so easily frightened that they 
run when a bomb falls near them. 

Men who have no confidence in the 
Divine ordering of things are subject 
to fear and disturbance ; but a man 
who has real faith in God, and be- 
lieves that all things are ordered for 
good, and thinks from day to day 
that he is dearer to his Heavenly 
Father than the terraqueous globe, is 
not easily disturbed. 

201 g. God Called, in Trouble. — 
As a child in the daylight plays, and 
has no special consciousness of its 
need of its parents, but in the night 
and in the darkness is frightened, and 
calls lustily for its father and mother ; 
so men in prosperity hardly feel their 
need of God, but when trouble comes 
they realize how weak man's strength 
is, and how needful it is that the 
human soul should be able to reach 
up and stay itself on the arm of God. 

2020. Test of Faith. — When a 
young mother has her first babe, if it 
whimpers and cries she thinks that 
pains and diseases are about to seize 



it. lUit the grandmother, tliat has 
had the care of her own children and 
her children's children, is not troubled 
when she hears a child cry. Now 
God is the everlasting Father of 
nations. For thousands of years he 
has been educating them towards 
manhood. There is no possible 
fantasy, or error, or deceit that is not 
perfectly familiar to him. There is 
not a road of prosperity or of 
adversity that he does not know. 
There is not a path that nations have 
ever trod, or that they will ever tread, 
with which he is not acquainted. 
And, you that are distressed, where is 
your God? Are you men that have 
faith in God when the sun shines, and 
that have no faith in him when it is 
cloudy ? 

2021. The Order of Faith. — The 
Apostle is setting up a peerage, in 
the eleventh chapter of the Epistle to 
the Hebrews. He collects from the 
past the memorable names of Jewish 
worthies, and gives them the glory of 
the great title, Faith. The highest 
Order that was ever instituted on the 
earth, is the Order of Faith. This 
chapter is the portrait-gallery of the 
Book ; and from it look down upon 
us the memorable names of remote 
antiquity. 

2022. Anxiety and Trust. — Where 
machinery runs without oil, and 
squeaks and grinds, it gets hot, and 
wears out speedily. Now, the anxiety 
is in human life just what grinding 
and squeaking are in machinery that 
is not oiled. In life, trust is oil. 
Confidence in God is that which 
lubricates life, so that industry and 
enterprise develop the things we 
ought to have, and do it in such a 
way that they bring pleasure with 
them. 

2023. Faith in the Divine. — On the 
great voyage we are making, storm- 



FAITH 



431 



whirl may sweep spray in our eyes so 
that we cannot see, storm-thunders 
may deafen our ears, but the Pilot is 
steering through the ages. I trust 
him though I cannot trust the storm. 

2024. Trust in God. — Wc have 
crossed many a gulf and many a 
roaring stream upon the bridge of 
faith, and have exulted to find our- 
selves safe landed, and have learned 
to trust Thee, as a child a parent, not 
because we know, but because Thou 
knowest. 

2025. Faith, in Practice. — My father, 
when in Litchfield, lived on a salary 
of eight hundred dollars a year, with 
a family of eleven growing children. 
How ministers lived at that time I 
cannot conceive. I remember his 
saying once, at table (I was not sup- 
posed to be in existence, for children 
did not amount to anything, ordi- 
narily), what made a deep impression 
on my mind. Having poured his tea 
into a saucer to cool, he was resting 
his two elbows on the table. Mother 
sat opposite to him, murmuring, in her 
sweet, refined, gentle, sad way, that 
the bills were due ; that she had no 
money ; that, indeed, she did not see 
how they could get along ; that for 
her own part she expected to die 
in the poor-house. At that, father 
dropped his hands to the table, and 
his eyes sparkled, and he said, " My 
dear, I have trusted God for forty 
years, and he never has forsaken me ; 
I am not going to distrust him now." 
That waked me up ; it was better than 
the catechism ; it sank into me ; and 
during my earlier life I went through 
perils of sickness and poverty and all 
forms of limitation and trouble, but I 
never lost sight of that scene and that 
sentence. 

2026. Activity of Christian Faith. — 
Light cannot confine itself to any given 
place. It has to travel. Heat can- 



not remain inactive. It is to radiate. 
What these elements shall do is not a 
matter of choice. And so there is a 
spontaneity in the true Christian faith 
by which it must work outward. 

2027. Drawn of God. — How little 
the drops that go up by the draught 
of the sun know that they shall shine 
in the rainbow, and glow in the^cloud ! 
So Thou art drawing us upward, we 
know not where, except that it 
shall be to joy and purity and dignity 
and glory. We do not understand 
these things yet, nor their mean- 
ings ; but we have faith to believe 
that Thou art sitting in an eternal 
Fatherhood of love, and that thy 
heart is full of power, and that all 
wisdom comes forth from it. 

2028. Man's Strength in God. — Re- 
member that in your own strength and 
in your own mere self you are weak- 
ness itself. But in God nobody can 
break you. There was a negro 
woman called Sojourner Truth. When 
Frederick Douglas — who was born a 
slave, and who ran away, and made 
himself one of the most powerful ora- 
tors that we had in the great battle of 
anti-slavery in America — was speak- 
ing in Boston, in the most profound 
discouragement before the war, as to 
the prospects of his race, he said, 
" We cannot emigrate to Africa ; that 
will never do. And we cannot fill up 
Canada ; it is not favorable to our 
race. And we are denied all privi- 
leges in America;" and he went on 
descanting on that and drawing the 
picture, as he could, darker and darker 
until it seemed as though doom itself 
w-as to settle down on the colored peo- 
ple : and as he sat down. Sojourner 
Truth, a little, crumpled-up black 
woman, black as your hat, rose in the 
audience, and said, " Frederick, is 
God dead?" And she sat down. It 
shook the whole audience. As long 



432 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



as God is alive, and you know it and 
feel it, you need not fear anything. 

2029. Reason and Faith. — Some- 
times men say that faith requires us to 
lay aside our reason. I beg your 
pardon, it never does. It is about 
faith and reason as it is about birds 
that both run and fly. A turkey that 
runs around in the woods never rises 
suddenly. It first runs on the ground 
till it gains sufficient momentum to en- 
able it to rise and fly. Reason is like 
legs that run on the ground ; and as 
soon as you have come to the end of 
the earth, if you need more, and you 
have faith, lift your wings, and you 
can fly. But one follows the other. 
Faith never can be said to be coinci- 
dent with reason. Reason is that fac- 
ulty which knows things so far as they 
can be known ; and up to the point to 
which they can be found out, you are 
free to use it; and, when you get to 
the end of knowing, if you have faith, 
then fly. All beyond is the region of 
faith. Faith is that which takes cog- 
nizance of things that are not within 
the sphere of knowing. And a part 
of Christian liberty is the right of free 
thinking and free believing. 

2030. Growth in Faith Gradual. — 
A plant sprouting is right, at that stage 
of its growth ; it conforms to the re- 
quirements of that stage. A plant 
half-developed is right, at that stage 
of its growth. A plant when per- 
fected is right, at that stage of its 
growth. But the half-developed stage 
is unlike the primary stage, and the 
perfected stage is unlike the half- 
developed stage. That which was 
true of the plant at either stage was 
best for it at that stage, but would not 
have been best for it at any other 
stage. This is true also of the grow- 
ing Christian. Early faith is feeble ; 
experience and realization give it 
strength : its last days are its best days. 



2031. God's Promises Laws of 
Nature. — The stars never wear out : 
they are just as good to-day as when 
Abram saw them directing the Ori- 
ental people by night. The sun is not 
weary from the number of years : 
there are no wrinkles on its brow. 
The urns of God are replenished by 
outpouring, and they increase their 
fullness by that which they yield. 
And so God's promises are as the laws 
of nature. The heaven and the earth 
shall pass away, but they shall not 
change in one jot or tittle, nor pass 
away. 

2032. Childish Lack of Faith. — 
Hear the children in the nursery talk- 
ing to each other as to where pa and 
ma are going to get their clothes and 
food. They cannot see. They do not 
understand pa's business. And they 
are fretting and worrying about where 
they are going to get what they need 
to eat and drink and wear. 

And yet, does not that mother her- 
self, when sickness comes, and little 
Robert is lying sick of one disease in 
one room, and little Mary is lying sick 
of another disease in another room, 
play the child, and a babe at that, 
and do just the same thing that she 
saw these children doing? And do 
not we do the same thing? "Your 
heavenly Father knoweth that ye 
have need of these things," is what 
God breathes into our ears. 

2033. Man's Ignorance: God's 
Providence. — When Napoleon was 
shut up in an island of the Danube 
— if my memory serves me, it is years 
since I read it — the Archduke Charles 
hemmed him in. He was able to 
maintain himself there, but he sent 
word to Italy and to Spain and to 
France, and he ordered his marshals 
with such minuteness, that every day's 
march was perfect. All over the 
north of France, and from the ex- 



FAITH 



433 



treme south of Spain and Portugal, 
tlie corps were, all of them, advanc- 
ing, and day by day coming nearer 
and nearer. Not one of them, on 
his march, had any idea of what was 
the final purpose, and why he was 
being ordered to that point. But on 
the day that the master appointed, 
the head of the columns appeared in 
every direction. Then it was that he 
was able to break forth from his be- 
sieged island and roll back the tide 
of war. 

The time may come when the things 
that seem to us the most worthless or 
the most unknown, or the most mys- 
terious, when we shall bring them 
together at last, and they converge to 
their final form and combination, will 
fill us with wonder and with rapture, 
and with all love of the wisdom and 
the goodness of our God. 

2034. Comfort in Christian Faith. — 
There never was a heart so smitten 
that there was not restoration in true 
Christian faith. When the rude ox or 
the fierce wind has broken off the 
shrub, and laid it down on the ground 
lacerated and torn, it lies there but a 
few hours before the force of nature 
in the stem and in the root begins to 
work ; and soon new buds shoot out ; 
and before the summer shall have 
gone round, the restorative effort of 
nature will bring out on that shrub 
other branches. And shall the heart 
of a man be crushed, and God send 
sweet influences of comfort from above 
to inspirit it, and that heart not be 
able to rise above its desolateness ? 

2035. Trusting God. — When I was 
young I used to help boys learn to 
swim. I would myself go out into 
deep water, and tempt the urchins to 
the end of the wharf. As they stood 
there I would say to them, "Jump, 
and I will take care of you." Jump 
they did, and I did take care of them 



— principally by making them take 
care of themselves. With a little en- 
couragement and a little touch, now 
and then, they would keep themselves 
up. Speedily they learned to swim. 
Now, it is a good thing for a man to 
be brought to extremities where he 
feels, "There is nothing but God for 
my soul. There is no such sympathy 
and wisdom and peace as his. It is 
what I need, and what I must have." 
In such cases the Lord says to men, 
"Jump!" and if they do jump his 
arm never fails them. 

2036. Living by Faith. — Ten thou- 
sand experiences in this life seem to us 
to be as rudely dealt with as an apple- 
tree when all the blossoms are stripped 
from it ; and yet, after the blossom is 
gone the germ is left, and all the 
season is before it. The old farmer 
does not care much about the blos- 
soms, not being sentimental ; but he 
says, " Boys, I am going to have 
apples." He has sense enough to 
live, not by sight, but by faith ; not 
by what is, but by what he believes is 
coming. 

2037. Mystery of Life Cleared. — 
Once, when a boy, I stood on Mount 
Pleasant, at Amherst, and saw a sum- 
mer thunderstorm enter the valley of 
the Connecticut from the North. Be- 
fore, it was all bright ; centerwise, it 
was black as midnight, and I could 
see the fiery streaks of lightning strik- 
ing down through it ; but behind the 
cloud — for I could see the rear — it 
was bright again. In front of me was 
that mighty storm hurtling through 
the sky ; before it I saw the sunlight, 
and behind it I saw the sunlight ; but 
to those that were under the center of 
it there was no brightness before or 
behind it. They saw the thunder- 
gust, and felt the pelting rain, and 
they were enveloped in darkness, and 
heard the rush of mighty winds, while 



434 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



I, that stood afar off, could see that 
God was watering the earth, and wash- 
ing tlie leaves, and preparing the birds 
for a new outcome of jubilee, and giv- 
ing to men refreshment and health. 
So I conceive that our human life 
here, with its sorrows and tears, as 
compared with the eternity that we 
are going into, is no more than the 
breath of a summer thunderstorm ; 
and if God sees that our experience 
in this world is to work out an ex- 
ceeding great reward in the world to 
come, there is no mystery in it to 
him. 

2038. The Rest of God.—" Return 
unto thy rest, O my soul." This is a 



lyrical outburst. The figure is evi- 
dently that of a bird. Some storm 
has rocked the tree, and by its vio- 
lence scared the bird away ; or some 
stealthy animal, squirrel, cat, or owl, 
has sought the brooding bird's life, 
and driven it forth ; or some wander- 
ing, wanton boy, prowling, has sought 
the nest, plundered it, and gone on. 
The bird hides in the thick leaves ; it 
watches from afar off. In silence it 
glides from bough to bough, keenly 
watching. Again and again it cir- 
cuits about until it is sure of safety. 
Then, with joyful assurance, it settles 
back in its nest, and when the sun 
rises, it pours out its joyful song. 



XXXVI. THE SABBATH AND WORSHIP 



2039. Sabbath Means Rest. — Rest, 
rest, is the primary idea ; and that 
falls in entirely with the whole consti- 
tution of man in every age and na- 
tion. We know very well that con- 
tinuity within certain limited bounds 
is on the way to success, and that be- 
yond those bounds it is on the way to 
disaster. We know that one single 
article of food, being continued for a 
long time, at last nauseates and dis- 
gusts. We know that things iterated, 
iterated, and iterated, often become 
hateful and injurious. One cannot be 
a wheel in a machine and revolve 
with perpetual revolution, and be a 
man. Variety, change, is indispen- 
sable to manhood. So there is ap- 
pointed a great intermission during 
every single twenty-four hours. One- 
third of every man's life is a Sabbath. 
On this principle civilization develops 
more, apparently, than on any other ; 
and it is on this principle that the 
commandment of the observance of 
one day in seven is founded. 

2040. Rest for Body and Brain. — 
On that Hebrew Sabbath day a man 



could not be driven afield, or starved 
if he did not do a given amount of 
labor. The poorest man was even 
with the richest. It was a day of 
emancipation. It perpetually set forth 
the liberation of the children of Israel 
from the bondage by which they were 
ground down in Egypt. Nor was the 
Mosaic Sabbath in any sense restrict- 
ive or burdensome. While it set man 
free from servile toil, it did not have 
an equivalent of bondage in the form 
of worship. Not alone the hoe and 
the plow, but the Confession of Faith 
and the Catechism, may make men 
toil and sweat. A man may have rest 
from bone and muscle weariness, but 
may have ten times as much fatigue 
of brain. The day set as a pearl 
among all the others, and the most 
blessed of the seven, is the Sabbath: 
and it should be perpetually observed 
as a day of Rest. 

2041. Rest for the Workingmen. — 
Never was there a period of the world 
in which the great mass of working- 
men had so much right as now to de- 
mand absolute rest during one-seventh 



THE SABBATH AND WORSHIP 



435 



part of the time. This is eminently a 
day in which the bottom should come 
up to the top, and breathe. As you 
have seen, on some lake, at evening 
twilight, when man and beast and bird 
no longer vex, myriad little fishes dot- 
ting and dimpling the whole surface, 
as they freely rise out of the water to 
breathe the air, so on one day of the 
week every living creature has a right 
to come to the surface, as it were, 
and take in the sweet fresh air of 
God's day of rest. 

2042. The Sabbath for the Poor. — 
Do not think, because you have this 
comfortable Sabbath, that the Sab- 
bath was made for you especially. 
Your interest in it, perhaps, is purely 
conventional. It is habitual. You 
observe it, very likely, because you 
have been told that the Lord ap- 
pointed it, and that you must keep it. 
You are keeping it, it may be, without 
any particular regard for it. I tell you 
a man who is rich, and has his house 
warm, can sleep under one blanket ; 
but if a man is poor, and his house is 
not warm, he needs three or four 
blankets. You are in such a condi- 
tion that you need only a little ; but 
there are tens of thousands in the 
community who are not in your con- 
dition ; and the Sabbath was made for 
them, and not for you especially. 

2043. The Sabbath of Puritanism. — 
There are some aspects of the Lord's 
day in my mcinory as a day of poetry. 
On that day it seemed to my young 
eyes as though the sacredness of God 
had descended from heaven and 
clothed the earth. Distances were 
never so long. Sounds were never so 
melodious. Never was there mystic 
brooding of heaven upon earth such 
as came down to my imagination on 
summer Sunday mornings that broke 
with light and beauty upon the Con- 
necticut hills ; and if then I could 



have been taken by the hand, and led 
into the garden of the Lord, and 
taught to hold communion with the 
invisible, there would not have been 
one dark spot on my recollection of 
the supreme beauty of that day of 
emancipation from labor of soul and 
body. 

But alas for the catechism ! Alas 
for the dinners of which I was de- 
frauded because I could not learn it ! 
Alas for the hours when I was shut up 
in a room by myself and made to 
study it ! Alas for the wearisomeness 
of going to church ! Alas for the 
aching of my little legs that could not 
reach the floor, and swung from the 
high board seats ! Alas for the rigor 
of that well-intended Puritan Sunday 
on which, though I rested in body, I 
was weary and worn out in mind ! 
The Sabbath was not a liberty to me : 
it was to me an imprisonment — a re- 
striction of my freedom. 

Now, this did not belong to the orig- 
inal Sabbath day. That day was not 
meant to be an oppression. It is a 
misuse of it that makes it a burden in 
any sense. 

2044. The Rest of Sabbath Wor- 
ship, — I plead for those that are on 
the great wheel of society, which is 
perpetually turning round and round, 
and that have no Sabbath. . , , If 
it is a question as to whether a man 
shall remain in his corner grocery or 
squalid garret or go to the country on 
Sunday, let him go to the country, in 
God's name ! 

But is that the best way in which 
the laboring man can spend the Sab- 
bath ? What we want for rest on Sun- 
day is change, variety, to give vitality 
to that part of ourselves which is not 
much developed during the other six 
days of the week ; and no men need 
so much cerebral stimulus as men who 
give six days out of every seven to 



43^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



nuiscukir or ineclumical work. To 
make a man think with the highest 
faculties, to give him inspiration, 
poetry, moral emotion — that is a reno- 
vation such as cannot come by merely 
snoring on a bed, or walking in a gar- 
den or field ; and I hold that every 
man, in proportion as he labors during 
the week, needs the spiritualization 
and uplifting which come from public 
worship, with its songs and teachings. 

2045. City and Country Sabbaths. 
— The complexity of higher civiliza- 
tion will require more flexibility of law 
in regard to the Sabbath than is 
necessary in the rural districts, or 
where the functions of society are 
very simple. Civilization is a very 
large machine ; and as the welfare of 
the whole is associated in a complex 
community, we should make up our 
minds that laws must deal differently 
in such a community from what they 
do in an uncompounded community, 
and that therefore we have no right 
to enforce these laws on religious 
grounds. I have no more right to 
make a man keep Sunday because I 
think God said he should, than I have 
a right to make him believe in my 
creed because I think God said he 
should. 

2046. Sabbath and the Saloons. — 
As to the Sabbath day, they are un- 
dertaking to suppress all those nests 
out of which disorder and immorality 
are hatched, not in the individual 
alone, but in such a way as to impede 
the progress of law in the community ; 
and on that ground of general good I 
hold that they have a right to shut up 
the grogshops on Sunday. Why do 
they shut them up on election day ? 
For the same reason. The law says 
that men shall not be made crazy. It 
is the interest of the commonwealth 
that men shall go to the polls with 
cool-headed reason ; and on the Sab- 



bath it is the interest of the community 
that, for the protection of property, 
and for the protection of life and 
limb, these places should be closed. 
It is on that ground, political and 
social, that I advocate the suppression 
of them on Sundays. 

2047. Necessary Labors on the 
Sabbath. — Whatever occupations are 
really necessary for the welfare of the 
community, or of the laboring classes, 
I advocate. The Sabbath is to be- 
come the servant of men. As our 
Master said, " The Sabbath was made 
for man." It is his beast. He has a 
right to get on it and ride it. It is not 
to be the beast riding him, as it is 
with a great many men under religious 
superstition. 

When the railways were being es- 
tablished, I was asked to sign a 
petition against the cars running on 
Sunday, and I refused to do it. . . . 
I would say to all the corporations, 
however, "It is wise for you to ar- 
range your establishments so that a 
portion, or portions, of every Sabbath 
in the year shall come in rotation to 
every one of your employees." 

2048. Sabbath-Keeping and Public 
Education. — If we are to gain any- 
thing by legislation in regard to the 
Sabbath, we have got to do it by 
moral power, — by the education of 
the moral sense of men as regards the 
benefits of the Sabbath. You must 
make the day honorable and beauti- 
ful. You must make it the sweetest 
day of the whole year. It is the 
breast of the week, from which we 
are to draw our nourishment. 

2049. Vitality of the Sabbath. — 
Circumcision has gone, sacrifices have 
gone. Mosaic laws and governments 
have gone ; but the Sabbath moves 
on. Like the pillar of fire that went 
by night before the Israelites in the 
desert, it is luminous. It leads for- 



THE SABBATH AND WORSHIP 



437 



ward the civilization of the present. 
Commencing in remote antiquity, it 
iias come down to us ; it has been an 
unspeakable blessing to the races of 
mankind ; and it is for us to make it 
more melodious and yet sweeter, and 
to send it as a grand chant of liberty 
down through the ages that are yet to 
come, until at last the earthly Sab- 
bath shall mingle with the heavenly 
Sabbath, and the heaven and earth 
shall be one, to rejoice together for- 
ever more. 

2050. True Worship. — All the ex- 
pedients of external worship in this 
world are but crutches to weak souls. 
The true worship is in spirit. It re- 
quires neither altar, nor priest, nor 
uttered prayer, but only the grateful 
heart, open before him who knows 
better than any one can tell him all 
that men would say. 

2051. Man's Praises Acceptable to 
God. — What are we, that we should 
mingle our voices, coarse and dis- 
cordant, with the voices of those that 
sing everlastingly, with joy and with 
love, in thy presence, O God ! And 
yet the voice of our children, though 
they be in the cradle and inarticulate, 
is sweet, and thou canst hear music 
where we hear but discord, and thou 
canst gather pleasure where we can 
only feel pain. For thou art God. 

2052. Religious Symbolism. — If I 
were to go once into a church with 
a picture of the Transfiguration, I 
should be filled with religious fervor ; 
but to sit Sabbath after Sabbath where 
it was, until I became familiar with all 
the gradations of color, the texture of 
the robes, and all the accessories, and 
it became a material representation of 
an immaterial thing, it would cease to 
have religious power, although it 
might still be beautiful as a work of 
art. I think painted windows help a 
man that does not often go to church. 



but not much those that do go, where 
they have them. In other words, this 
principle plays two ways : infrequency 
of repetition sends a man towards the 
spiritual, constancy of physical repre- 
sentation draws a man towards the 
material. 

2053. Dangers of Ritual. — We have 
a trellis >r a grapevine in order that 
the vine lay bring clusters for us ; 
but suppose the vine should die, and 
the trellis should remain, and the man 
should gnaw that, what satisfaction 
would there be in it? It is precisely 
so with the ceremonies of the religious 
life. They first originate as illustra- 
tions of a higher spiritual truth ; and 
all such things ai'e useful only in their 
first flash and revelatory power ; but 
when they are repeated day after day, 
day after day, they are apt to degen- 
erate in the minds of men universally, 
and the worshipers are prone to 
descend from the spiritual elements to 
the human instruments. This is idol- 
atry. 

2054. Faulty Idea of Unity in 
Worship. — As to the repetition of the 
same forms, the creeds, the confes- 
sions, the psalmody — everything that 
is used by universal Christian wor- 
ship — there can, in the necessity 
of the human structure, be no absolute 
unity, simply because words have as- 
sociations as well as etymological 
conditions, because the same word 
means one thing to the poet and 
another thing to the orator, and another 
thing to the logician, and another 
thing to the philosopher, and so forth. 
To me, of all the words in the world, 
" mother " is the richest, and " father " 
the stateliest. For my father was a 
great-hearted, magnanimous man, 
gentle and most generous. But your 
father perhaps was a drunkard and a 
tliief, and all your associations with 
that name are of vice, and rudeness. 



438 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



and cruelty, and ciime. One has 
one thought, and another has anotlier 
thought ; though pertaining to the 
same words, they include the associa- 
tions of days gone by ; the educated 
habits, the experience of life-forces 
that are in you, are struck, and every 
man is like a steeple with a chime of 
bells, but every chime is different from 
the neighboring chime. 

2055. The Sacrifice of the Wicked. 
— " The sacrifice of the wicked is an 
abomination to the Lord." Well, 
now that has become a kind of phrase 
current ; but when you hear it stated 
in another way how harmless it is. It 
is a declaration simply that where a 
man makes religion a cloak under 
which to carry on his wickedness, he 
need not think that all his obsequious- 
ness under the altar and his offerings 
in the temple are going to do any 
good to him. Where a man gambles 
all the week, and then goes to the 
communion table, and puts a large 
handful of money into the box for the 
poor, and goes out and gambles again 
all the week, and comes to spend a 
sort of atoning Sunday in his place, 
and sings his hymns, and listens to 
the sermon, and goes out and gambles 
again all the week long, the Sunday 
does him no good. The sacrifice of- 
fered by the wicked is equivalent to 
the "prayer" of the wicked; and 
where a wicked man makes his prayer 
simply to cover up his wickedness, — 
not to deliver him, but to give him 
immunity in it— it is an abomination, 
not only to God, but to every man 
that has any moral sense. 

2056. Invitation to the Communion. 
— If there be any who hunger and 
thirst, come: here is bread, and here 
is wine. " Rut, I am not a member 
of any church." That makes no dif- 
ference. Christ calls not the righteous, 
but sinners. If there is anybody who 



is really chid from top to bottom in 
righteousness, he can go : this is no 
place for him. But if there is a 
hungry soul here, if there is a thirsty 
soul here, if there is a man here who 
knows that he has faults, who knows 
that he has sinned, who has tried to 
be a Christian and failed, and who 
says, " I am so discontented with 
myself that if God has any love for 
me I will take it gladly," let him come 
to this table and be fed. Take the 
broken bread, and remember by that 
symbol that Christ's body was broken 
for you. Come, lean upon him, and 
trust in him. 

2057. Communion-Day. — As bells 
answer bells, and strike with sweet 
collision in the air, so may heart 
answer heart, and joy answer joy, 
upon this wedding day, when those 
who are affianced to God are openly 
united to him in holy communion. 

2058. Praise-Songs. — Praise is not 
the recitation of all the good qualities 
that you can think of in God. It is 
the utterance of the joy and gladness 
which the Divine excellence tends to 
excite in you. As a child I had an 
idea that angels stood about the throne 
very white and very pure, and recited 
before God what they thought of him. 
I did not like it, and I thought I was a 
miserable wretch because I did not. 
But as I grew older, it struck me that 
my child-instinct was correct, that I 
was under a misapprehension, and 
that they who praised God in heaven 
were represented as doing it musically, 
because high feeling tends to utter it- 
self through the medium of music. It 
struck me that praising God was not 
so much reciting and rehearsing God's 
qualities as the report of a man's own 
inward joy, as excited by the aspect, 
the glory, the office of God. 

2059. Praise to God, a Human not 
a Divine Need. — How revolting to us 



THE SABBATH AND WORSHIP 



439 



is the idea of angels and archangels 
circling about the Creator of the uni- 
verse with harps, praising and flatter- 
ing him ! We understand what the 
parasites of the court do. We are fa- 
miliar with the history of Queen Eliza- 
beth, who, though she praised herself 
enough, was covered and saturated 
with praise on every side. We know 
that potentates never hear the truth 
of themselves. And the thought that 
in heaven there is One who sits su- 
preme and makes everything that 
comes into the celestial sphere pay 
taxes and tributes of praise to him, is 
abhorrent to every manly sentiment. 
But if God is intrinsically so noble in 
nature, so glorious in holiness, so pure 
in love, and so transcendent in all the 
functions of his being, that the mo- 
ment the whole picture is disclosed to 
your heart, you can no more refrain 
from praising him than you can re- 
frain from giving expression to your 
emotions when wrought upon by in- 
spiring music, then the case is changed. 

2060. Church Organ Music. — I am 
accustomed to think of a congregation 
with an organ, as of a fleet of boats in 
the harbor or on the waters. The or- 
gan is the flood, and the people are the 
boats ; and they are buoyed up and 
carried along upon its current as boats 
are borne upon the depths of the sea. 

2061. A Singing Church. — A church 
that does not sing is like a spring with- 
out birds, or like a garden without 
flowers. Singing to the Lord was 
meant to open up the hearts of those 
who participate in it, and carry them 
near to God, 

2062. Singing and Religious Inspi- 
ration. — A man who does not know 
how to sing might almost as well be 
dumb before God. Singing is the 
natural inspiration of religious feeling 
and thought. You need not withhold 
your tribute of service though you do 



not sing well. Do the best you can, 
even though you do but poorly. If 
you are an indifferent singer you need 
not sing like Niagara. Though you 
have a strong voice, if you do not 
know how to use it, sing modestly, 
with that understanding. This is 
common sense. 

2063. Inspiration of Hymns. — 
Hymns are like trumpet calls to a 
sleeping warrior, which wake him and 
instantly bring him to his feet, sword 
in hand. 

2064. Uplifting Power of Singing. 
— There is a railroad to the top of 
Mount Washington. A man that 
sings is like a person who gets into a 
car and is whirled up that mountain 
by steam, without labor, so that when 
he reaches the top he is fresh, and can 
enjoy himself ; but a man that does 
not sing is like a poor fellow who 
goes up on foot, over rocks, through 
ravines, panting, puffing and blowing, 
so that when he reaches the top he is 
too tired to enjoy the view. 

2065. Singing a Defence Against 
Temptation. — If one had a thousand 
or a hundred hymns in his memory, 
and if with every changing mood he 
was accustomed to hum to himself 
some sweet descant of experience he 
would not easily be made unhappy, 
nor would he wander far from the 
path of rectitude. Singing is the 
golden bow and arrow with which 
Satan would be smitten through and 
through, and temptation would be 
disarmed. 

2066. Hymnody to be Cultivated. — 
Congregational singing does not spring 
out of the ground, nor does it come 
by accident. Churches do not sing, 
as birds do, by nature : they sing by 
grace, if they sing at all ; and the 
means must be apphed. We there- 
fore desire to see the cultivation of 
music going on. 



440 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



2067. Congregational Singing. — 
You never can have congregational 
singing, if that is all you have. Un- 
less you have singing in the family 
and singing in the house, singing in 
the shop and singing in the street, 
singing everywhere, until it becomes 
a habit, you never can have congre- 
gational singing. It will be like the 
cold drops, half water, half ice, which 
drip in March from some cleft of a 
rock, one drop here and another 
there ; whereas it should be like the 
August shower, which comes ten mil- 
lion drops at once, and roars on the 
roof. I like to see people sing when 
they have to stop in the middle of the 
verse and cry a little. I like such un- 
written rests and pauses in the music. 

2068. Church Singing.— I would 
not be understood as undervaluing 
taste and beauty in song, as you know 
I do not, by the history of this church, 
where there has been so much done 
to promote growth and admirableness 
of song ; but that is always to be sub- 
ordinate to the soul. The moment 
you begin to sing in church for con- 
cert effects, and to feel that nothing 
will do but the most exquisite style of 
music, that moment sacred song goes 
into Babylon. That moment it is in 
bondage. For it is the minister of 
joy to the heart. It is the minister of 
peace. It is that which gives voice to 
rapture and hope. It is love. It is 
fellowship. It is triumph in the Lord 
Jesus Christ. Song is the wing by 
wliich we rise higher, with easier 
l)eats, than by any other ministration 
of the sanctuary. 



2o6g. Wealth in Ideas. — I would 
rather have written that hymn of 
Wesley's, 

" Jesus, lover of my soul, 
Let me to thy bosom fly," 

than to have the fame of all the kings 
that ever sat on the earth. It is more 
glorious. It has more power in it. I 
would rather be the author of that 
hymn than to hold the wealth of the 
richest man in New York. He will 
die. He is dead, and does not know 
it. He will pass, after a little while, 
out of men's thoughts. But that hymn 
will go on singing until the last trump 
brings forth the angel band ; and then, 
I think, it will mount up on some lip 
to the very presence of God. 

2070. Hymns in Heaven. — There 
are some of our hymns that make me 
think of the story that is told of the 
Brahmins, in their book, of seven 
brothers who undertook to go to 
heaven. On the way, first one died, 
then another died, and then another 
died, until, finally, the last surviving 
brother, after indescribable experi- 
ences, accompanied all the way by 
his faithful dog, came up to the gate, 
and was about going in, when an 
angel said, " You cannot take your 
dog in with you," and he turned 
around and went away. 

I think we shall be allowed to take 
hymns in with us up there — hymns 
which have been wings to many, many 
souls, who have been enabled to fly 
over ground that they could not walk 
upon. 



XXXFIL THE CHURCH 



207 1 . A Call to Church-Membership . 
— I appeal to you, by all that is honor- 
able and all that is right-minded in 
you, to begin a higher life, and to 



begin it in association with others that 
are attempting to do the same thing. 
Do you think you will fail? / think 
you will fail. I never knew a man 



THE CHURCH 



441 



that did not fail. Yet the motto is 
" Cast down but not destroyed." If 
you stumble and fall, get up again. 
You are like men journeying, part of 
the time through a morass, and part 
of the time up rugged hills, and part 
of the time in thickets that tear them. 
And it is not for you to insist that you 
will not walk a Christian life unless 
you can be in the king's highway, and 
unless you can keep yourself intact. 
I call you into the church that you may 
be more profited in it than you can be 
out of it. 

2072. Well-Wishers. — There are 
well-wishers in this congregation. 
You wish me well ; you wish this 
church well ; you wish the cause well ; 
you wish everybody well ; you would 
not do any harm. Ah ! you are seeds 
that will not sprout, though you be 
planted never so many times. You 
are chaff. There is no seed in you. 
I long to see in you something more 
than this mere negative well-wishing 
— some uprising ; some sense of 
power ; some heart-hunger ; some 
yearning for noble things ; some indi- 
cation that, when quickened by the 
Sun of Righteousness, there is in your 
soul a power to stretch out branches, 
to push out dormant buds, to have 
clusters, to bring forth fruit, and to 
bring it forth abundantly. 

2073. Receiving One Another. — We 
are to receive men in our churches in 
the spirit of love, as Christ has re- 
ceived us — as we have been received. 
If men had been strained, and only 
the pure jelly had come out, and the 
skins and seeds and all the rest had 
been thrown away, there would have 
been very little jelly in this world ; 
but we are taken in our totality. We 
are taken with our weaknesses, with 
our passions, with our erratic courses, 
with our bad habits, with our strong 
carnalities. We are taken with our 



ignorances and conceits. We are 
taken to God through Jesus Christ, 
not because we are good at all, but 
because God is good. 

2074. Joining the Church. — I am 
asked, " Suppose now, Mr. Beecher, 
one should come to you, in Brooklyn, 
on communion day, early in October, 
and say, ' I have been thinking of my 
past life, and I am not satisfied with 
it : my mind runs in too low a chan- 
nel ; my ideals are ignoble, base, 
worldly, and I have but an imperfect 
knowledge of the law of God, though 
so far as I can see it requires right liv- 
ing, and I am determined to attain it — 
may I partake of the Lord's Sup- 
per?' " I would say to him, "Yes, 
you may. Not that it is going to do 
you any miraculous good, but that it 
will produce an impression on your 
intellect and imagination." " May I 
join your church ? " " Yes, if I have 
evidence that you are intelligent 
enough to know what you are doing, 
and if I perceive that you are deter- 
mined, according to the best of your 
ability, to live a Christian life, and 
that you have begun it. Under such 
circumstances I will take you into my 
church as a child is taken into an 
academy." Is it asked, whether I 
require an examination ? Yes, I do. 
I say to one applying for admission to 
a school, " If you do not know enough 
to enter the academy, you had better 
go into the primary school;" and I 
take him in, not because he is a per- 
fect scholar, but because he wants to 
learn. And to a person applying for 
admission to the church, I open the 
door, and say, " Do you want to live 
a more manly life ? Are you willing 
and determined to pattern your life on 
the ideal manhood as set forth by 
Christ Jesus?" If he gives affirma- 
tive answers to these questions, I say, 
" You had better come into the church, 



442 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



because the church is a phicc where 
we take men who are desirous of do- 
ing these things, and where they do 
them in little before they can do them 
in large." 

2075. Duty of Church-Membership. 
—The banners fly ; and whoever is 
for the Lord, must come and enlist 
under the banner of Christ Jesus. Do 
not sneak and hide, and, because you 
are relatively imperfect, refuse through 
your misinterpreting pride to join the 
church of Christ. 

2075. Church-Helpfulness in Chris- 
tian Living. — A man living a Christian 
life outside of the church is like an Irish 
laborer who takes up a little bit of land 
in the neighborhood where he had his 
first jobs, and where the railway per- 
mitted him to plant his little patches 
of potatoes outside. All the cattle 
that range in the neighborhood have 
access to it if they please ; he has to 
defend it in every way. And if it be 
something besides potatoes— if it be 
strawberries, he will have more help 
in picking the strawberries than he 
will want. Every boy and every 
neighbor that passes by will wish him 
good luck, and then pluck. When a 
man is trying to live Christlike out- 
side the walls of the church, men do 
not know that he is trying to do it. 
They think they have a right to pull 
him this way and to push him that, to 
tempt him here and to tempt him 
there ; but when they know that he 
has gone into the school of Christ, 
they do not want him to play the tru- 
ant. It docs help a man. 

2077. Good Men Bettered in the 
Church. — One of the most favorite 
pears in the market is the Duchesse 
d 'Ang07il?me, which was a wilding 
and grew in a hedge, until one day 
the proprietor, going to visit his pro- 
vincial farm, saw the fruit, tasted it, 
and was delighted with it. So he de- 



termined to transplant it ; and he 
cleared away the hedge, took up the 
plant, carried it into his garden, and 
cultivated it. The result was that it 
became almost the pear of the world. 
And it was fitting that, instead of be- 
ing allowed to bloom and bear its 
luscious fruit in obscurity, it should 
have been brought into the garden 
where it could be seen, and where its 
fruit could be enjoyed. 

I think there are magnificent fruit- 
trees growing in worldly hedges yet, 
which might well be taken out and 
put in Christ's garden, where there is 
a better soil and a better exposure, so 
that they might spread their branches 
unchecked by surrounding growths. 

2078. The Church a Hospital. — 
There is nothing that makes discords 
in churches, and between separate 
churches so hateful as the conscious- 
ness of the imperfection of all churches 
and all church-members. To see a 
general breaking-out among well, 
strong men, is bad enough ; but to 
see men who are gathered together in 
a plague -hospital fall out with each 
other, and to see bed rail at bed, and 
fevers send gibes over to fevers, and 
dropsies swell with tumid importance 
and great superiority over emacia- 
tions, and emaciations point and chat- 
ter at the hideousness of dropsies — 
that is worse still. But are not all 
churches hospitals ? 

2079. Variety in Church Member- 
ship. — When you take the loaf of so- 
ciety and cut off the upper crust, 
slicing it horizontally, you get an elect 
church. Yes. it is the peculiarly elect 
church of selfishness itself, the elect 
church of impious selfishness. But 
you have got to cut the loaf of society 
from the top down to the bottom and 
take in something of everything. Now 
every church would be very much 
edified and advantaged if it had in it 



THE CHURCH 



443 



scholarly men, knowledgeable men, 
but a church is strong in proportion as 
it has in it something of everything 
from the very top to the very bottom, 

2080. The True Church Welcomes 
All. — Some astronomers are studying 
the nebulas, some Jupiter, some Saturn, 
some the sun, and so on ; and they 
bring together all the results of their 
investigations, and unite them ; and 
the sum total makes the one astron- 
omy. The true church is that which 
takes the gifts of all its members, and 
instead of quarreling with and perse- 
cuting and treading under foot each 
the peculiar views of any other, unites 
them as far as possible. 

2081. Church Unity. — Everybody 
wants unity in the churches, every- 
body is striving to bring them to- 
gether ; and there would be no diffi- 
culty in uniting them outwardly if that 
were enough ; but what would be the 
advantage of a mere external unity 
of the churches? 

What advantage would it be in a 
village if all the inhabitants should 
say, " The citizens of this village 
should be perfectly united ; and, 
therefore, let us move our houses up 
so that they will touch each other. 
Moreover, let all the people of this 
town have the one name, Ada?m. 
Besides, let us all have breakfast and 
dinner and supper at the same hour 
and minute, at the stroke of the bell." 
They might secure unity in these out- 
ward things, so as to be able to say, 
" There is not such a united village in 
the world as we are ; " but what would 
be the advantage ? 

2082. All One in Christ Jesus. — 
Every true Christian man is a Jew, in 
the sense in which the Jews prided 
themselves as being descended from 
Abraham, and having all the promises 
of the covenant. That comes, not by 
outward blood and historic descent, 



but by the blood of Christ to every 
man. And see how sweeping this is. 
Neither is there any difference be- 
tween civilized and uncivilized per- 
sons. It was " Greek " and " barba- 
rian " when the Greek spoke. It was 
"Jew" and "gentile" when the 
Jew spoke. It is "Christian" and 
"heathen" when we speak — for we 
always elect ourselves to the chief 
places, and then call all the rest of 
the world by some other name. 

2083. Honorable Humility. — When 
you come to chink a log cabin, stubble 
and mud are very honorable, and 
very useful. So in the house of God, 
the humblest man may at least be 
that, if he is not too proud — for pride 
runs down, I think, even as strongly 
as it runs up. 

2084. Complementary Natures. — 
The conception of the church is that 
one man supplies another man's lack. 
If one brother has a large heart and a 
small head, and you have a large 
head and a small heart, you and he 
are twins, and the church is rich by 
you two, as it is not by either of you 
alone. If one man has the most pro- 
found veneration and almost no love, 
and another man has almost no ven- 
eration and the most audacious liber- 
ties of love, they are twins, and one 
carries the lights while the other car- 
ries the shadows. If one man has no 
use of words by which to express his 
feelings, and another man has such 
power of language that when he feels 
the words fly from his lips hke flocks 
of birds from a tree when one claps 
his hands near by, those two men 
ought to stand together. A church is 
made rich by the sum of the gifts of 
all its members. 

2085. All Elements Needed. — It is 
often true that in the economy of 
church life the experience of the hum- 
ble, plain man is far more edifying 



444 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



than the mere wisdom of the edu- 
cated man. We are the body of 
Christ ; we are feet and hands, ears 
and mouths. Some things are higher 
than others. The brain is better than 
the muscle, and the muscle than the 
bone ; and yet the bone is very neces- 
sary, the muscle is necessary, and the 
brain necessary. The church needs 
the high and the low. 

2086. Help at the Critical Time. — 
Suppose I had lain where all night I 
had heard the discharge of minute 
guns ; suppose as the morning dawned 
I saw here and there parts of a ship 
that had sunk, and among the frag- 
ments I saw a man that had survived 
the wreck, and that, clinging to a 
plank, was working his way to shal- 
low water. Suppose that as he got 
off and staggered towards the shore a 
wave took him and swept him out 
again ; and as he gathered his re- 
maining strength and got upon his 
feet once more, and made a desperate 
struggle to save himself from a watery 
grave, I sat and said to myself, " I 
think that fellow may escape : I will 
watch him, and if he succeeds in get- 
ting to the shore and out of the water, 
I will take care of him." I would 
deserve to be drowned myself ! If 
you see a fellow-creature in a perilous 
situation like that, it is your business 
to rush down and seize him, and give 
your strength to his weakness, and 
bear him so that the refluent waves 
shall not carry him back. How do 
you treat those who are struggling to 
escape the tides of sin ? 

2087, The Easier Way. — A man 
may walk to California across lots if 
he has a mind to ; and if he gets 
there, he has got there — that is all ; 
but that is not the easiest way, and it 
is not the way that would be most 
likely to get him there. A man may 
educate himself and never go to 



school : but it is a great deal better 
that a man should go to school ; it 
will facilitate his learning, and enlarge 
him in many ways. If, by any mis- 
adventure, a man's history is such 
that he is morbidly sensitive to the 
restraints of church life (I have known 
such), I do not say to him, "You 
can't be saved outside of the Church." 
I say to him, "It is a pity that you 
cannot come into the Church ; but if 
you cannot come in do the best you 
can outside. We will help you so far 
as we are able. You can always come 
and hear preaching, even though you 
cannot take upon yourself the obliga- 
tions and receive the help of church 
fellowship." 

2088. Christians Outside of the 
Church. — I was looking around the 
early part of the week, on my place 
at Peekskill, and when passing by the 
borders of crocus and snowdrop, I 
found in the grass in front of the old 
cottage quite a number of little, mod- 
est, blue flowers growing, here one, 
there one, and yonder one ; and I 
was delighted to see them growing 
there. They were crowded, and the 
grass was greedy of everything that it 
could suck up, so that they had 
rather a hard time of it. Still, they 
had their leaves and blossoms above 
the ground ; and although they were 
small they were beautiful. Upon the 
whole, I do not know but I enjoyed 
seeing them so much because I was 
surprised to find them outside of the 
borders where I had a great many of 
them, and where they had grown 
twice the size of those. 

It occurred to me, when I was 
looking at these little flowers. That 
is just the way folks try to be Chris- 
tians outside of the Church. They 
can grow in the grass, and blossom, 
but then they have to fight for it. 
Everything divides nourishment with 



THE CHURCH 



445 



them, and though they blossom and 
are beautiful, yet, after all, they are 
dwarfed ; and do not do half so well 
as they would if they were in the 
border which is prepared, and in 
which it is meant they should get 
their full stature. 

2089. Confessed Christianity a Safe- 
guard. — When I first came from In- 
diana to the East, I visited an eminent 
arborculturist in Dorchester. It was 
known that I was editing an agricul- 
tural paper, and I was introduced by 
my friend to his foreman as the editor 
of the Farmer and Gardener, The 
foreman, never suspecting that I was 
a minister, sat down on a bench to 
talk with me ; and, being a profane 
man, he poured into my ears a stream 
of oaths, and nudged me, as much as 
to say, "Don't you think so.?" ex- 
pecting me to swear back again. The 
sense of humor has always been a 
very strong quality in my mind, and 
the thought that I was a minister, and 
did not believe in swearing, and that 
this man was swearing in my presence 
with such blessed unconsciousness, 
presented to my mind a ludicrous 
state of things. I indicated to my 
friend that the man did not know who 
I was. Then I was introduced as the 
Reverend "^Ir. Beecher, when the man 
apologized, saying, "I did not know 
you were a minister, or I would not 
have used the language I did." 

The moment it is known that a man 
is a Christian, and a member of the 
church, a thousand forms of impro- 
priety, not to say wickedness, no 
longer present themselves to him. 

2090. The Church for Sinners. — If 
any man comes to me and says, " Now 
I am willing to be called a Christian, 
and I want to join your church, for I 
think that I am in a state in which 
I can hve a perfectly Christian life," I 
say to him, "Go away. We do not 



want you. We have no arrangements 
for such folks." God sent us to con- 
duct an institution and economy which 
has in view the healing of the people. 
I am, we will suppose, a physician 
having charge of a hospital. There 
comes one who has been struck by a 
bullet, and whose breast is terribly 
lacerated. I say, " Pass him into 
Ward No. 6," and away he goes. 
Here comes another man, bandaged 
and limping. His arm is broken, and 
he has received a severe wound in 
the leg. I give directions for him to 
be taken to Ward No. 7. Presently 
there comes up a brisk, fine-looking 
fellow, who says, " I wish you would 
let me go in." " What is the matter 
with you?" I ask. "Oh, nothing," 
he says ; " I am fit to go in ; I am all 
right in every respect." "Then you 
cannot go in," I say. "This is not 
the place for people with whom there 
is nothing the matter. It is not a 
tavern ; it is a hospital." 

2091. The True Church. — Some 
churches are like lighthouses, built 
of stone, so strong that the thunder of 
the sea cannot move them, — with no 
light at the top. That which is the 
light of the world in the Church is not 
its largeness, not its services celebrant 
with pomp and beauty, not its music, 
not the influences in it that touch 
the taste or instruct the understand- 
ing : it is the Christlikeness of its in- 
dividual members. 

2092. City Missions. — Our churches 
are men-of-war ; our mission schools 
are little steam-yachts that these men- 
of-war send out into the shallower 
waters, or where they cannot go. 

2093. Foreigfn Missions. — I believe 
in foreign missions. I believe that 
they have their best results, however, 
at home. The old musket was far 
more effectual at the butt than at the 
muzzle, and the kick-back of the 



446 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



education which leads us to go out 
into all the world to preach the 
gospel elevates the standard of devo- 
tion in our home churches. I think 
that our home churches are more 
profited than the heathen ones, — 
although they are helped. 

2094. Commerce and Christianity. 
— As the mail-carrier knows nothing 
of the messages which he bears and 
distributes, as he knows nothing of the 
joy or the woe that comes from 
those messages, so, though Commerce 
bears God's messages round and 
round the globe, it may not know 
what is does. But it is a missionary ; 
and its instincts and interests are 
calling for the education of the 
nations of the globe. Shall Com- 
merce, from a blind instinct of selfish- 
ness, go into the mission field, and 
shall Christians, inspired by the dying 
love of Christ, do nothing but stand 
and say, looking upon schools and 
churches, "To what purpose is all 
this waste ? ' ' 

2095. Lack of Sympathy for Men. 
— As a body of men, the scribes and 
Pharisees were not men of bad 
morals, more than are many church- 
members of the present day. Neither 
were they men who lacked fidelity to 
the religious principles in which they 
were educated. The Pharisees were 
in some respects the Puritans of their 
time. They were that portion of the 
Jews who stood up for reformed 
Jewish worship. They brought back 
the faith of Moses from its heathen 
wanderings, and strictly adhered to it. 
But they preferred the Church to the 
people, the State to the people, the 
Temple to the people, their Denomina- 
tion to the people. Their guilt was 
simply this: a contempt for human 
nature ; utter heartlessness about the 
common people. And because they 
were without humanity, and mercy, 



and sympathy, notwithstanding they 
had personal power, and were faithful 
to their theologic faith, and were the 
most enlightened of the times in 
which they lived, Christ crushed them 
with mountains of denunciation. 
There is no such invective as came 
from the lips of Christ Jesus against 
men who were utterly devoid of sym- 
pathy towards their fellow-men, 

2096. Different Kinds of Christians. 
— So you will find every conceivable 
degree in the Church. Men are not 
like plates, in sets. If a plate is 
broken, you go back to Ovington's 
and ask him for a plate of this 
pattern ; and it will not do to give you 
a plate of any other pattern, in order 
to make up the set. Thus people 
think that Christians are made in sets, 
and that this Christian doesn't match 
with the rest in the church. " He has 
a different pattern on him," they say. 
No ! no ! men are not earthenware or 
hardware. They are living creatures 
of every conceivable difference — 
different in genius ; different in body ; 
different in appetites ; different in pro- 
portion of reason, of emotion, of 
sensibility, or of settled judgment; 
different in imagination ; in tender- 
ness ; in scope ; in rapidity ; and 
every man is converted and grows 
after his own way and kind. The 
glory of Christ's garden is its variety ; 
and that variety runs through moods 
of quickness or slowness of develop- 
ment. The development is first here, 
or first there, in all the endless com- 
binations. 

2097. Weakness of the Church. — 
The Church of the present evidently 
is a church of sinful men not yet 
sanctified. It is the assembling to- 
gether of the sick, although they may 
be convalescent. We should not seek 
beauty in hospitals ; and as long as 
pride and selfishness are what they 



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now are, as long as the spirit of evil 
so largely baffles the work of grace — 
so long the Church, comprehensively 
viewed, will be rather a hospital than 
a mansion or a household of beauty. 

aogS. Lack of Christian Sympathy 
in Churches. — Every one has a right 
to feel that when he goes into the 
church of Christ he goes into an as- 
sociation, a brotherhood, where the 
principle of gentleness and kindness 
is carried to a higher degree than it is 
outside of the church. But the 
Church is keyed, often, very low in 
the matter of sympathy. Formality, 
and separations into classes, and 
divisions by a great many worldly 
distinctions, break up the sense of 
brotherhood. Too frequently persons 
who go into the church are like those 
who go at night to a hotel. Each 
lodger has his own room, and calls 
for what he himself needs, and does 
not feel bound to take care of any of 
the other lodgers. And a church, 
frequently, is nothing but a spiritual 
boarding-house, where the members 
are not acquainted with each other, 
and where there is but very little 
sympathy. 

2099. Class-feeling in Churches, — 
Are there not thousands of people 
round about churches that have oc- 
casion to say, " No man cares for 
my soul : they care for music, they 
care for fine preaching, they care for 
church ordinances, — but I am an insig- 
nificant man. I am neither very holy 
nor very good, and therefore I need 
somebody ; but nobody cares for my 
soul. If I go to church, they stick me 
somewhere in a corner, as though 
they were ashamed of me, and look 
at me as though to say, ' What are 
you here for ? ' That is no place for 
me." 

Let me say, to the shame of many 
of our churches, we are much worse 



than the Catholics. . . . When I was 
abroad and went into their cathedrals, 
all classes came together. Even in 
the Madeleine, in Paris, built for 
glory, magnificent, there was no dis- 
tinction between the rich and the 
poor. They all came together. No 
man looked to see what squalid person 
knelt beside him on the cold pave- 
ment. In that regard they set an 
example to us, as they also do in 
many other respects, and as we might 
to them if they would only make a 
fair exchange. 

2100. Mixed Elements in Churches. 
— The church gets to be a caravan, 
or, worse than that, a caravansary, 
where in the middle of the desert 
chance travelers stay for a night, and 
each one travels for his own affairs, 
not only, but often is disgusted with 
the nature of his neighbor. How 
many churches there are of that kind 
— great containing-shells in which 
there is very little cohesion of the 
parts ; and how infinitely they are 
below the divine conception ! 

2101. The Church and the Man. — 
A man cannot do a certain duty, be- 
cause he must save the church ! Now 
the church is of no more account than a 
straw, except for the justice and the 
truth that are in it. When you have 
sacrificed real piety for the sake of 
saving the church, you have killed a 
man and got a corpse. 

2102. The Church, Man's Servant. 
— When men open the doors of the 
sanctuary on Sunday, the church is 
not my master : I am its master, for 
I am a son of God. It is simply the 
chariot which he has sent to carry me 
on my journey. 

2103. Religious Masks. — There is 
a religious language, "Cant," as it is 
called by some. It is made up of 
what are called by others "pious 
phrases." There are many postures, 



448 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



there are many methods of carriage, 
there are many things that men do or 
say, or neglect to do or say, which 
are " churchly " as it is said, and 
which men take on as signs that they 
are Christians, until by and by they 
are covered all over with seemings. 
They wear particular masks on partic- 
ular days. They wear a pleasant, 
cheerful mask at home on week days ; 
on Sunday they wear a darker mask ; 
and on fast days they wear a black 
one. So, like an actor in a theater, 
they have a costume for every char- 
acter they wish to personate. 

2104. " Misunderstood." — Could 
you not point out some in your church 
that are forever under a cloud be- 
cause they are not appreciated, — 
because their worth is not understood, 
— because their value has never been 
justly estimated, — because, being 
weighed in the great scale of society, 
they are always too light ? You may 
be sure that nature, and society, and 
universal experience, do not lie about 
these men. Where is their labor? 
Where is the exponent of their in- 
dustry ? Where is their bountiful 
beneficence ? What tears have they 
wiped away ? What useful thing have 
they done ? Where are the evidences 
of their desert ? They are barren 
and granited from head to foot, so 
that even moss will not grow on them. 

2105. Church-Members to be Trained. 
— The desire to get men into the 
church, the driving them in, the 
throwing the net far and wide to 
catch them, the sending out shep- 
herds to run them in, sheep-like, and 
then letting them alone — that is not to 
be commended. It is like bringing 
raw material into a shop, and leaving 
it unmanufactured. 

2106. The Worst Heresy.— There 
is no heresy in the long list of those 
which have invaded the Church, like 



the heresy of negativcness, of inac- 
tion, of death. The idle church- 
member is the great heresiarch. 

2107. Authority in Thinking. — The 
highly organized animals — the birds 
and beasts of the upper rank — select 
their own food, and reject what they 
dislike. They range the air or the 
earth, find, take, or leave, as it pleases 
their tongue. It is the round clam 
that lies still, and lets the water bring 
him what it will. It is the round clam 
— that pattern of devotion ! which 
opens, eats, shuts, and is a clam still. 
And the clam ranks not a degree 
higher on the scale because the whole 
ocean is so big, that brings in his food 
to him. He is but a clam. 

So, though the Church of two thou- 
sand years may roll in its waves upon 
the individual, if the individual only 
opens, takes, shuts, eats, digests, and 
opens, takes, shuts, eats, digests, he is 
but a clam spiritual. 

2108. Independent Workers for God. 
— When David went out to meet 
Goliath, Saul, who vvas of the old 
regulation pattern, said, '* Put on my 
armor;" and David put it on; but 
he rattled about in it like a snail in a 
lobster-shell ; and, throwing it off, he 
said, " Give me my sling." And he 
took the sling — a weapon that he 
knew how to use — and smote the old 
Philistine in the forehead ; and down 
he came. Let those use the sling who 
can best use the sling, and let those 
use the sword who can best use the 
sword. Use anything that will answer 
your purpose in saving men and serv- 
ing God. 

2109. Past and Future Church 
Work. — How shall it be in the 
future? You never saw a successful 
Christian work begun in any church 
by hankering after something that was 
past. A farmer who should sit down 
and think what a crop he had year 



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449 



before last, but should do no plough- 
ing and planting in the spring, would 
be left with an empty granary in the 
autumn. 

2 no. Oneness of Creed. — I am 
suspicious of that church whose mem- 
bers are one in their beliefs and 
opinions. When a tree is dead, it 
will lie any way ; alive, it will have its 
own growth. When men's deadness 
is in the Church, and their life else- 
where, all will be alike. They can be 
cut and polished any way. When 
they are alive they are like a tropical 
forest, some shooting up, like the 
mahogany-tree ; some spreading like 
the vine ; some darkling like the 
shrub, some lying, herb-like, on the 
ground ; but all obeying their own 
laws of growth — a common law of 
growth variously expressed in each — 
and so contributing to the richness 
and beauty of the wood. 

211 1. Church Discipline. — A poor 
woman who sold apples, cakes and 
candy was a member of a certain 
church in New York, and was 
disciplined for keeping her shop open 
on Sunday. She pleaded that the 
profits of this one day in the week 
was just the difference that enabled 
her to pay her rent — that without it 
she could not support herself ; but the 
Session (good men), were obliged to 
discipline her, although one of the 
members of that Session kept one of 
the largest hotels in town. There is a 
good deal of difference between keep- 
ing an apple-stand and a hotel. 

21 1 2. Unchristian Fellowship. — My 
heart is very sore, though not for my- 
self. During the past few weeks the 
papers have been filled with things 
which have come very close to me. 
A man who stood high in office in this 
city, who stood higher yet in useful- 
ness, who was clear of understanding 
and of the kindest feelings, through a 



mistake which many of you may be 
committing to-day, and which many 
men who have died on beds of honor 
have committed, is discovered, and 
he comes to the ground. His church 
lays him on the public dissecting 
table, and cuts him up with a delibera- 
tion that is extraordinary. It dwells 
on his sin, his guilt, his fall, and his 
destruction, until you find that it is a 
church clearing its own skirts in deal- 
ing with him. It is making record 
before the public as the elder brother 
did, saying, as it were, "See how 
much better we are." Where is the 
sympathy that ought to be shown by 
Christian men towards an erring fel- 
low man? I have very little knowl- 
edge of the facts, but I know that 
when a Christian brother is in trouble 
there ought to be a pavilion of Chris- 
tian hearts into which he can enter. 
He ought not to be left to die in de- 
spair. There ought to be tears 
enough shed for him to wash away his 
transgression. It is a sad thing to see 
a cannibal church, and to see men 
rent and devoured under the name of 
religion, of honesty, and of purity. 

21 13. Self-Help in Church-Making. 
— Every single summer, in the water 
around Peekskill, come swarms and 
troops of crabs, dropping their old 
shells ; and they are houseless, and 
lie tender in the water. We neither 
pour lime into the stream, nor do we 
carry them anything at all. We let 
them wait ; and there develops out of 
every healthy crab a shell that covers 
it. They make their own shell. They 
only want healthy Hfe to take care of 
the covering. Now, through all the 
community, the churches of the Lord 
Jesus Christ have the power in them 
to develop their outside covering, 
provided there is zeal, and strength, 
and fervor, and Christian experience 
enough. 



450 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



21 14. The Real Meeting. — One of 
the great difficulties with meetings 
ordinarily is that people are so sepa- 
rated as to lose the whole social ele- 
ment. You will notice that, after a 
prayer-meeting, which has been very 
dull and very stiff and very proper, 
has been closed, and the brethren 
gather around the stove, they com- 
mence talking socially among them- 
selves, and then it is that the real con- 
ference meeting begins. One deacon 
says, " Brother So-and-so, when you 
were speaking on such a topic you 
said so and so." He goes on and 
makes quite an effective little talk, but 
you could not have dragged it out of 
him with an ox-team during the meet- 
ing ; and so one and another will 
speak up and join in, and they will 
get warmly interested in their discus- 
sion. Around the stove was the real 
meeting. The other was the mere 
siinitlacrum of a meeting. 

2 1 15. Speaking in Meeting. — Look 
around the household. Here is one 
of the family who talks incessantly to 
everybody, and all the while, and 
with reasonably good sense — consid- 
ering how much there is of it ; but 
here is another who hardly talks a 
word all day, except with her eyes. 
She listens, she hears, she nods as- 
sent, but she does not speak ; though 
oftentimes in her silence she is more 
interesting than one that talks. And 
you do not take it to be treason against 
the family, nor to be evidence of a 
want of affection, that she does not 
talk. And if freedom in what is called 
demonstrativeness is allowed to per- 
sons according to their disposition in 
the lower circle of friendship, is it not 
allowable in the higher circles of spir- 
itual fellowship ? 

21 16. Men Who Should Speak in 
Meeting. — In meetings, those accus- 
tomed to speak, emotive and imagina- 



tive persons, persons that are excitable, 
do the talking ; whereas, the man of 
thought, the man of patient investiga- 
tion, the man who has reaped the field 
of life, and is full of valuable experi- 
ence, sits silent, a year, five years, ten 
years. He never opens his mouth. 
He is a granary full of corn, not a 
single kernel of which is dropped into 
the ground. It comes in silent, it 
stays silent, and goes out silent, and 
does not propagate itself. And there 
is many a man of ample resources 
who keeps those resources to himself. 
Is that right ? 

21 17. Insincerity. — When I hear 
brethren rejoicing in conference meet- 
ings, I am glad of it, unless I have 
reason to suppose that those are mere 
banners thrown up, just as we put 
flags out at any great celebration. A 
man may be an old hunks, and not 
care a snap for his country, but if 
everybody is putting up flags he is 
going to put them up, too. 

2 1 18. Undisclosed Histories. — We 
have listened to many interesting ex- 
periences to-night ; but, after all, the 
undisclosed histories of our church are 
more than those that are brought to 
light. If you take a handful of sand 
upon the seashore and bring it home, 
every grain may be like a crystal ; but 
what is that handful compared with all 
that you left behind ! If you take a 
cup and go to the spring on the side 
of a mountain, and bring it away 
filled with water, the drops that you 
bring may be beautiful and refresh- 
ing ; but what is that cup of water 
compared with all that flows from the 
spring, day and night, through the 
whole round year! And, at best, 
what are the things that we bring 
here ? We may be sure that what- 
ever we say in these meetings, more 
will remain unsaid than is said. The 
measure of our hearts does not at 



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451 



all compass the goodness of God to 
us. 

21 19. Naturalness in Prayer. — Be- 
cause a man with a great heart and 
mighty experience pours out the tides 
of his devotion before God in sentences 
that roll and tumble like porpoises in 
the deep, shall I exclude him from the 
prayer-meeting and the church ? Be- 
cause a man has not studied Lindley 
Murray, because he is not in agree- 
ment with Webster, shall I deny him 
a voice in the sanctuary ? Because a 
man's speech is like a ship rolling and 
tossing in the wind, shall I say to him, 
" Take in sails, draw into port, and 
cast anchor " ? Shall I reject a man's 
efforts to worship God because his 
manner is rude, and so not according 
to the prescribed ideas of movements 
and methods? And if a man is 
rhetorical, when he speaks shall I 
criticise him because, as is natural to 
him, he uses well balanced sentences, 
and rounds up his periods in the most 
polished style ? If his manner of 
speaking and praying be natural, 
either with education or without it, it 
is his liberty, not only, but your riches, 

2120. The Conference-Meeting. — 
You do not think it needful to bring 
all the dross that is in the gold from 
California to exhibit it. You think it 
is enough to bring the gold and ex- 
hibit that. And it is not needful that 
you should exhibit all the dross of ex- 
perience, and make it equal to the 
real expei^ience of Christian life. The 
point where the soul catches the light 
of heaven ; the point where the Holy 
Ghost, resting on the affections, kin- 
dles them into responsiveness to God 
— that is the point where the world 
should begin to see religion. 

21 21. Audience not to be Scattered, 
— You know that to build a fire you 
lay down a small splinter, and put 
another on that, and another across 



that, and another upon that, and keep 
putting one on top of another, so that 
they readily catch fire when lighted ; 
and on this you put dry wood ; but if 
you put one stick in one corner of the 
stove, another in another corner, and 
so on, scattering them about so that 
they do not touch each other, you will 
not kindle a fire all day long. When 
you want to build a fire you have got 
to bring your kindlings together ; and 
if you want to kindle a fire of the 
Holy Ghost in a prayer-meeting, or a 
flame in any meeting, those present 
should not be scattered here and there 
about the room, but should sit to- 
gether, 

2122. Woman in the Prayer-Meet- 
ing, — The strangest thing in the world 
to me is, that the church, by a mis- 
conception of Scripture, has excluded 
from its benefit one of the choicest 
parts of devotion, I mean women's 
praying ; for I do not hesitate to say 
that God made woman to be the natu- 
ral priestess, compared with whom we 
men are but clumsy specimens of 
virile shallowness. We have not the 
depth of heart that she has ; and yet, 
women are not heard to pray in our 
meetings. They who easily run into 
heaven by the mere impulsion of 
thought, they who are almost born to 
the service of the altar, they who 
walk in daily familiarity with heavenly 
things, they whose experiences natu- 
rally draw them into the channel of 
prayer — for the most part they never 
pray, unless it be over our cradles in 
childhood, when we do not know it. 
The church has always been lean, and 
it will always be lean till women pray 
in its meetings. 

2123. Safety in Expression, — There 
are a thousand influences in life that 
are mischievous, which would not be 
so if they had room to expand. There 
are men who make trouble in churches 



452 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



because they are not allowed to ex- 
press themselves freely. Let a man 
spread himself, and relieve his mind, 
and he will settle down and become a 
manageable and efficient worker ; 
whereas, if you hedge him up, and 
attempt to repress the manifestation 
of his feeling, by and by, in spite of 
the deacon on this side, and the dea- 
con on that side, and the minister in 
front, he will gather force, and burst 
out somewhere. Let a man give loose 
rein to his feeling. You can bear it, 
and he will be relieved. 

2124. Churches Need Excitement. 
— Gardeners know full well that plants 
which grow under glass are never as 
healthy as those which grow in the 
open air, among other reasons be- 
cause they cannot get wind. The 
plants that grow out of doors where 
the winds rock them have certain ele- 
ments of health which you cannot 
secure in plants that grow under 
cover. We have an artificial wind in 
the larger green-houses to remedy, as 
far as possible, the disadvantage to 
plants of being grown within doors. 
Plants require motion. And as it is 
with plants so it is with churches. 
They need excitement — social, mental, 
spiritual. A dull church is apt to be 
a weak church. 

2125. The Soul in Danger. — If 
some sweet, fair child, a blossom of 
love, the dear center of every thought 
of tenderness, had died ; if when 
sickness invaded the house, no skill 
could save ; and the child was dead ; 
and if the child being laid in its 
beauty in some adjoining chamber, 
the mother should commence dancing 
up and down, and singing the wild 
song, " My child is dead ! my child is 
dead!" you would send after the 
doctor for her. But you are doing it. 
There is many a man that is doing 
it. He does not believe the truth. 



"Oh, I know all about this stuff. I 
was once converted myself. I have 
been through it. There is no truth in 
it ; I do not believe in it any more : I 
am happy enough. These folks are 
all in bondage." He has lost his 
soul, and is dancing! 

2126. Rare Virtues Remembered. 
— I knew a mean but very rich man 
who one day was surprised into doing 
a generous act, and never forgot it. 
Five years afterwards you could hear 
him tell, in his neighborhood, what he 
did once ; and ten years afterwards he 
still rehearsed the old story of what 
he had once done. But he never re- 
peated the act, though he recollected 
it. There are persons who have an 
experience. They remember when 
they were roused up once — yes, they 
remember it, — only ! 

2127. Laboring for a Revival. — 
When men say to me, " Your revivals 
are got up," I say. So are crops. So 
is civiHzation. So are good manners. 
So is arithmetic. So is business. So 
is everything else. Of course revivals 
are got up. There is nothing worth 
having in life that is not procured in 
that way. Do you scorn a product 
because you can say, " Here is the 
machinery by which it was pro- 
duced" ? Do you disdain a man's 
intelligence because you can say, 
" He went to the primary school, to 
the high-school, to the academy, to 
the college, and to the law-school, 
and it was produced by this ma- 
chinery " ? Is there any harm in 
using proper causes to produce cer- 
tain results? 

2128. Religfious Excitement. — Those 
denominations and churches and min- 
isters who believe in revivals, in in- 
tensity in religion, go to the root of 
the matter. There are some objec- 
tionable things in religious excitement; 
but there is also much that is good. 



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453 



And if men say tluit passion is not 
religion, my reply is tliat there is no 
religion without passion. For, though 
passion is not religion, religion in its 
nature is intensive. But the higher 
feelings are not necessarily boisterous. 
The most intense feelings are often 
the stillest. It is when the fire is first 
kindled that there is the most smoke 
and crackling, while the bark and 
softer external parts are being con- 
sumed. As the fire comes nearer 
and nearer to flame, the less there is 
of smoke. And by and by the coal 
surpasses the flame. And the heat 
is greatest when there is the least 
sparkling and snapping and roaring. 

2129. Grades of Religious Revivals. 
— I see a very perfect overcoat, warm, 
fine-fitting, lined, all plushed ; and I 
say, " That is the kind of overcoat for 
a gentleman." But I cannot get it; 
I haven't the money. There is a 
coarse roundabout, that I do not hke 
as well ; it is not half as good ; but I 
would take it rather than go without 
any. Then there is a pea-jacket that 
is not half as fine as the second one 
— a great lubberly thing, that, on a 
man, looks like a cloth box about 
him. I would rather have that than 
shiver without any. Then there is a 
great big army blanket, which is 
homelier than any of them. I would 
take that army blanket rather than 
not have anything. 

Now, the lower forms of religious 
revival are coarser than the higher 
forms ; there is more dross in them ; 
but they are better than nothing, and 
are acceptable on the way up to the 
higher forms. 

2130. Revivals and Reactions. — 
Though intense feeling is not religion, 
yet true religion tends to excite feel- 
ing. If not doing any harm is the 
only thing to be thought of, as many 
persons seem to think, if being safe 



and having no reactions is the chief 
idea of religion, then the safest thing 
in the world is a horse that is spav- 
ined, and knock-kneed, and broken 
down, and spare-ribbed, and so feeble 
that he cannot think of running away, 
and could not run away if he did 
think of it. 

2131. Variable Moods. — The vari- 
ableness of Christian moods is often a 
matter of great and unnecessary suf- 
fering. But Christian life does not 
follow the changes of feeling. Our 
feelings are but the torch ; our life is 
the man that carries it. The wind 
that flares the flame does not make 
the man waver. The flame may sway 
hither and thither, but he holds his 
course straight on. . . . Our wind- 
blown feelings rise and fall through 
all our life, and the draught of death 
threatens quite to extinguish them ; 
but one moment more, and they shall 
rise, and forever shine serenely in the 
unstormed air of heaven. 

2132. Revivals. — It is a glorious 
thing to have a freshet in the soul, — 
to have the better feelings overflow 
their banks and carry out of the chan- 
nel all the dull obstructions of ordi- 
nary life. It reveals us to ourselves. 
It augments the sense of being. 

2133. The Primitive Church. — We 
have reason to suppose that the Chris- 
tian church never separated itself 
from the old Jewish church until after 
the destruction of Jerusalem. Up to 
that time the Temple was sacred alike 
to those that were Jews of the strictest 
sort, and to those that were Christian 
Jews. 

We have almost an exact analogy 
of this in modern history. When 
Wesley undertook to reform the 
Church of England, he did not sepa- 
rate his disciples from the Established 
Church ; and to the day of his death 
they did not leave it. They remained 



454 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



in it, and observed its ordinances and 
rules, at the same time holding sepa- 
rate meetings of their own, over and 
above those of the Church. And the 
early Christians still adhered to the 
Temple-service, though they had their 
social gatherings besides, until the 
city was destroyed, and the Temple 
with it, and they were driven from 
it. Then they were obliged to frame 
some other organizations ; they took 
the synagogue for their pattern, or 
copied largely from it. And the cir- 
cumstances of these organizations va- 
ried almost infinitely. There was no 
prescribed outward form for the 
Church. 

2134. The Church a Natural De- 
velopment. — Christianity, largely con- 
sidered, is not an organized church, 
though this is one of its instruments. 
Churches spring from the spirit of 
Christianity in the same way that 
households spring from love and wed- 
lock. They are not commanded. It 
is not commanded that one should 
dwell in a house with a family ; but 
if persons are united in love there is 
no need of command. It will take 
care of itself. There was no com- 
mand in the New Testament to organ- 
ize Christian churches. That matter 
would take care of itself, and did. As 
soon as men begin to be interested in 
each other, and to seek each other's 
welfare, by instruction, by comfort, 
by help, they have to meet: and, 
meeting, the law of convenience, 
time, place, custom, country — all 
these determine the forms of meeting ; 
so churches spring up inevitably. 
And that is the Apostolic Church, 
that is the real Church, which answers 
the ends of piety best. 

2135. The Church a Sustainer of 
Christian Life. — These flowers on the 
desk before me now depend for their 
support on the cup in which they are 



placed. They did not, however, a 
few hours ago. Then they had their 
own several roots, and drank their 
own supply, night and day, from the 
earth. But now that they have been 
plucked from their own roots, they are 
dependent upon this extrinsic source 
of supply. The moment they were 
deprived of their roots, that moment 
they ceased to have power to obtain 
their own sustenance. The Church 
has been made to be, in a certain 
sense, a vase, in which Christians, cut 
off from their roots, have been sup- 
plied with water by the hand of the 
priest, and have been dependent for 
juice and sap upon extrinsic help. 

2136. Church Lineage Interesting 
— Not Vital, — I have no objection to 
any Episcopal communion tracing it- 
self back as far as England. There 
is no harm in taking an old house to 
pieces and building a new house out 
of the materials of the old. And if 
our Episcopal Church is formed from 
the elements of the Church of Eng- 
land, it is no worse for that. It would 
be a matter of some antiquarian pleas- 
ure to trace it back to England, and, 
similarly, for the Church of England 
to find its source in the older Roman 
hierarchy. I do not object to persons 
having a love for such things. All I 
say is, that they are incidental and 
collateral, not essential. 

I like to see the clematis climb 
about the doors of my house — and 
it does. I hke to plant vines and 
bushes about my dwelling. They 
make it sweeter and more delightful. 
I never open my window in summer, 
that a hundred flowers do not send in 
their airy thanks to me. But give me 
my inside life ; give me my compan- 
ions in the household, and if there 
were not a flower on all the lawn, nor 
a vine on all the building, it would be 
home to me still. 



THE CHURCH 



455 



2137. Baptism. — The ordinance 
and act of baptism is simply declara- 
tory. It declares a fact, that is all. 
It does not make a change, nor seek 
to make a change. The attempting 
to live heart-clean by the washing of 
the Holy Gliost, as by the washing of 
water we attempt to live body-clean — 
that is spiritual baptism. And out- 
ward baptism is the mere sign and 
declaration to the world that the subject 
of it is being cleansed in heart by the 
Divine Spirit — or that he thinks he is. 

2138. Variation of Ritual. — Some 
men think that baptism is regenera- 
tion. I don't think it is regeneration 
or anything like it. It is merely a 
sign. I do not think a man is a good 
soldier because he has put a cock- 
ade on his hat ; but the cockade on 
his hat is a sign that he is a soldier. 
Baptism is the outside sign of a cer- 
tain supposed condition. I respect 
my own conscience and liberty ; I re- 
spect the liberty and conscience of 
everybody else ; and I say, You may 
sprinkle ; you may pour ; you may 
immerse ; and I receive you notwith- 
standing. You are as good as I am ; 
and all that I ask is : Receive me, too. 

2139. Religious Rites. — "Let not 
him that eateth despise him that eat- 
eth not." That was one of the Levitical 
ceremonials or symbolizations which 
had as much importance as whether a 
man shall turn his back to the con- 
gregation when offering prayer, or 
whether he shall read from the back 
of an eagle and call it a lectern. 

2140. Unity of Spirit, Rather than 
of Thought. — Join with me in the 
heartiest prayer, not so much that God 
will unite his people by common 
thinking, common ordinances, com- 
mon governments, or any of these 
external things, but that he will so 
exalt the power of Cliristian sympathy 
and Christian love that men of every 



organization, of every sect, and with 
every way of worship, shall be irre- 
sistibly brought together, heart to 
heart. As drops to drops of water 
make the streams that nourish the 
land, and make it glad, so may the 
loving inspirations of heart joined to 
heart flow down like the river of life ! 

21 41. The Business of the Church. 
— If the sun should take counsel with 
itself, and say, " Here am I, a splen- 
did old sun, and I have got to take 
care of my light : everything depends 
on me, and it will not do for me to 
compromise myself, and go into that 
deep valley, into that dark cave, or 
into that obscure thicket. My busi- 
ness is to keep bright, and to take 
care of myself." What kind of a sun 
would it be that should talk thus.'' But 
you will find ministers and churches 
talking in the same way. They say, 
" It is the business of the Church to 
take care of religion." Did Christ die 
for religion, or did he die for man ? 

2142. Modern Miracles. — I am 
amused when I hear sects and 
churches talk about having evidence 
of Divine authority because they have 
miracles. Miracles in our time are 
like candles in the street at midday. 
We do not want miracles. They are 
to teach men how to find out truths 
themselves ; and after they have 
learned this, they no more need them 
than a well man needs a staff, or than 
a grown-up child needs a walking 
stool. They are the educating ex- 
pedients of the early periods of the 
world. As such they are divinely 
wise ; after they have served their 
purpose as such, it is humanly foolish 
for persons to pretend to have them. 

2143. Piety From Unlikely Con- 
ditions, — We very properly look for 
flowers in soil, and not upon rocks. 
But what if some wind has caught a 
seed and dropped it in a seam in the 



456 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



face of a cliff, and kind rains visit it, 
and a scanty soil hospitably feeds the 
beautiful thing, pcrclied up a thousand 
feet above its fellows, nodding and 
shining like a pendulous breast-pin 
on the bosom of a cliff, shall we de- 
clare that there is no flower there, 
because it was so little to be 
expected there ? Christ has followers 
in every sect. And we are to ac- 
cept the facts of piety against all 
presumptions created by the sys- 
tem in which it may have grown. 

2144. All Churches Needed for the 
Church. — No church is, or ever was, 
perfect, nor can be. It transcends 
the measure of human power. Per- 
fection means so many things, and in 
such degrees of excellence, that it 
does not belong to any one. I think 
very highly of a great many separate 
flowers — of the rose, of the camelia, 
of spring flowers ; I do not know any 
one flower that does or can represent 
the floral kingdom. The homeliest 
have all the perfume, often. The 
highest have form, and no fragrance. 
Some have the purity of white. Some 
have glowing tints of red, scarlet, and 
what not. Some bloom in spring ; 
some late in autumn, and only then ; 
and some all the time. Some are 
floriferous, and others are scant and 
parsimonious of their beauty. You 
cannot conceive of a flower that can 
be made to represent the sum-total of 
these ; for a flower cannot be homely 
and handsome at the same time. It 
cannot be fragrant and inodorous at 
the same time. It cannot be chary 
of its beauty, and at the same time 
multitudinous in its bloom and blos- 
som. Therefore, God causes different 
qualities to inhere in different blos- 
soms. And the whole vegetable king- 
dom represents the vegetable king- 
dom. Nothing short of that will do 
it. All churches make the Church. 



2145. Denominationalism. — Was 
there ever anything so foolish, so 
squeamish, so absurd as all this talk 
about the sanctity of the Church, and 
about a man's loyalty to his denomi- 
nation ! You might as well talk about 
my loyalty to the fences round about 
my farm. P'ences are very good 
things against wandering cattle, but 
you need not make a life-and-death 
matter of them. Yet, some one of 
your crusty old farmers will spend 
half he is worth on a lawsuit, because 
a man has three inches of his 
territory. Life is too short and too 
precious for these things, and when a 
man can go into another denomination 
to preach to their acceptance, and can 
hold them around about him, in the 
name of Heaven, in God's name, and 
in the name of love, let him be ! 

2146. Efficiency of Sects. — The 
Roman Church thinks it is a broom- 
handle, and that all other churches 
in Christendom are like the splints of 
a broom — spht up into many parts. 
Well, I never saw any one use a 
broom-handle for sweeping. It is the 
splint part that is used for that pur- 
pose ; and it is by means of the in- 
numerable splints that one is enabled 
to sweep clean. It is the multiplica- 
tion of sects that brings out truth, 
enterprise and higher manhood ; and 
it is by what they do that we are to 
judge of their value. 

2147. Unchristian Orthodoxy. — It is 
a narrow orthodoxy that cannot work 
with anything but itself. 

When, during the terrible railway 
disaster at New Hamburg, men were 
rushing in crowds to rescue from the 
wrecked cars those that were in them, 
or to drag from the water those that 
had been thrown into it, do you sup- 
pose it was necessary for them to stop 
and say, " Are you a Republican, or 
are you a Democrat? Because I am 



THE CHURCH 



457 



not going to be seen working along- 
side of a man not of my political be- 
lief, and have people suppose that I 
endorse all his abominable political 
doctrines?" Would not that have 
been monstrous? And yet, in Brook- 
lyn, within my time, for years and 
years, the Sunday-schools of the 
Unitarian churches were not allowed 
to walk in procession with the Sun- 
day-schools of the orthodox churches, 
on Anniversary days ; and the Unita- 
rian churches had to draw off their 
schools and form processions on other 
days ; because it was feared that the 
little orthodox children would catch 
some heresy from the little Unitarian 
children, if they were allowed to walk 
with them in the street ! Over that 
scene, Christ was sad, and the devil 
was glad. 

2148. Religious Intolerance. — As 
mud on whiteness is a great deal more 
apparent than mud on greenness, or 
on blackness, according to the color 
of the mud on the road ; so nowhere 
in the world is evil more apt to be 
indulged and more conspicuous than 
in religious circles, in the strifes of 
men in respect to authority in 
ecclesiastical affairs, in respect to the 
importance of truth in doctrines, in 
respect to questions of administration 
in church life. There is nowhere 
that men should be so very tolerant 
of each other, and there is nowhere 
that the Church of Christ has been 
more bitterly intolerant than in many 
church matters. 

2149. Sectarian Misjudgment. — It is 
the old story over again of the statue 
of a man and a lion. It is said that 
a lion, on seeing the image, said, " If 
I had been the sculptor I should have 
made the lion on top of the man, and 
not the man on top of the lion." I 
never heard a man of one denomina- 
tion make a statement of another de- 



nomination's doctrines so that that 
denomination would accept it. 

2150. Christian Esprit de Corps. — 
To be proud of your company ; to be 
proud of your officers ; to be proud 
of your regiment ; to be proud of 
your division ; to be proud of the 
army corps to which you belong ; to 
be proud of the cause which you have 
espoused ; to have a common feeling 
of sympathy with those with whom 
you are associated — this is one of the 
elements that make a grand army, and 
ensure success. And that which is 
true of the outward military life in this 
respect is even more true of the social 
and spiritual life of Christian men. 
They should feel each other's hearts 
beat. They should rejoice in the 
sense of being united in seeking a 
common end and aim. 

2151. The Church Militant. — When 
the great Army of the Potomac was 
about to move, there was no feeling 
of rivalry between the infantry and 
the cavalry, or between the cavalry 
and the artillery. They all belonged 
to the one army ; and these different 
sections supplied elements which went 
to make a grand unity, a total whole. 

The army of God is divided into 
different sects ; and there is no reason 
why they should stand in jealousy over 
against each other. They are parts 
of one great body, and they ought to 
be in affiliation and sympathy one 
with another. 

2152. Sects: Variety. — Sects are 
the flowers, all children of the sun, 
yet widely different in their structure 
and appearance. Would you reduce 
them all to one, and have nothing but 
daisies, nothing but tulips, or nothing 
but violets ? Sectarian organizations 
(but for their thorns and prickles) 
are all of them wise. I believe in 
the organization of Christians into 
churches, as I believe in the forming 



458 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



of churches, by elective affinities, into 
sects. ]Jut sects are not Christianity. 
They do not represent the whole of it. 
Christianity is represented by the sum 
of all the sects, and not by any one 
of them. 

2153. The Test of Instrumentalities. 
— Though you have a straight line of 
apostolic successors, if your work is 
poor, you are not in the line of suc- 
cession ; and if your church does not 
make full-grown men, it is not. I do 
not care anything about the line of 
succession of my grapes, if my vine- 
yard brings forth better wine than 
your vineyard does. You may say 
that yours came from those that Noah 
planted ; but by their fruit ye shall 
know them. And the test of all 
churches, as of all orthodoxies, and 
all doctrines, and all usages, and all 
governments, is this : What is their 
effect upon the generations of men ? 

2154. Religion Hindered by Eccle- 
siasticism. — Perhaps the most extraor- 
dinary contrast ever known to history 
is that which exists between the genius 
of the Gospels and the pompous claims 
of church hierarchies. Christians 
made haste to repeat the mistakes of 
the Hebrews. Religion ran rank to 
outwardness. The fruit, hidden by 
the enormous growth of leaves, could 
not ripen. Spirituality died of eccle- 
siasticism. If the Church has been 
the nurse, it has also been often the 
destroyer of religion. 

2155. Partisanship in Church Life. 
— Even in our religious feelings, we 
are prone to follow our sympathies 
rather than our judgments or con- 
sciences, and to measure ourselves by 
the general condition of the church or 
sect to which we belong. We are as 
if we were in a ship, and we called its 
voyage our voyage, and its passage 
our passage. And if our church or 
sect is flouiishing, we have a feeling 



that we arc flourishing ; and so we 
lose our personal identity. 

2156. The Principles of Protestant- 
ism. — The German Protestant de- 
clared, " I have rights as against the 
Church." The Puritan Protestant de- 
clared, " I have rights as against (Gov- 
ernment." The Independent or Con- 
gregational Protestant declared, " I 
have rights as against civil govern- 
ments, church governments, and all 
mankind. Neither the multitudes nor 
the organized few can take from me 
what God gave, and I will preserve." 
These were the three great strides 
which landed on Plymouth Rock. 

2157. Church Councils and Author- 
ities. — An " independent church," in 
the phraseology of our time, would 
seem to mean a church that is allowed 
to do just as it pleases, under the dic- 
tation of a neighboring church. The 
idea is that there must be competent 
men enough to determine what the 
minister shall do, and then, obeying 
them fully, he may do what he has a 
mind to ! If I were a Presbyterian 
minister, and my presbytery would 
give me authentic certainty that they 
would stand in my place at the judg- 
ment seat of Christ and take all the 
odds there, I would preach as they 
told me to ; but every man shall give 
an account oi himself heiore God. If 
my bishop, kindly and calmly, would 
enter into bonds satisfactory that he 
would take care of me in the Day of 
Judgment, and say that I was his dis- 
ciple and did what he told me to, 
that would ease my mind very much. 
1 have a right to ask a council for in- 
formation where I need it, and I am 
grateful for it. 

2158. Congregationalism. — This 
church has been in the true sense of 
the term a Congregational Church. It 
has never been governed by its min- 
ister. I cannot say that I have no in- 



THE CHURCH 



459 



fluence over my church ; I have a 
good deal of influence over it — fully 
as much as I ought to have ; but I do 
not think I have a particle of authority 
over it. There are no things trans- 
acted in this church on the sly. 
There has never been anything fixed 
here so that you could not help your- 
selves and choose between what you 
thought and what your pastor thought. 
Everything has been as free as air in 
debate on every question. You have 
done what seemed to you best, 
whether I agreed with you or not ; 
and there has been no ill feeling. I 
have been bearded by young men in 
my parish ; I have been put down in 
discussion here ; I have been over- 
ruled now and then ; and I have felt 
very proud of it. I do not want to 
raise a team of horses and have them 
act like cows. What I want in my 
church is a collection of men capable 
of self-poise, inspired with the highest 
motives, and competent to act inde- 
pendently and coherently. 

2159. Christian Men cannot be Dis- 
fellowshiped. — As a good street-lamp 
cannot be put out by the wind, and as 
a city set on a hill cannot be hid, so a 
church that stands on Mount Zion 
cannot be put down. Any church 
whose members love the Lord Jesus 
Christ in sincerity and in truth, who 
are rearing well-ordered households, 
and who are preaching and practicing 
the great precepts of the Gospel, will 
stand and shine in spite of all jurisdic- 
tion, and be loved by all that love 
Christ. You cannot disfellowship 
them ; for, although you may say to 
them, "You shall not come into our 
councils, our conventions or our con- 
ferences," you cannot say to them, 
"You shall not come into our hearts." 
1 will defy a man who is a Christian 
not to admire and love whatever is 
Christian in other people, whether 



they stand inside or outside of his 
pale. 

2160. The Church of the Future. — 
Beware of religious faiths that sepa- 
rate men. Beware of religious faiths 
that put forth a hand bearing a flail, 
and go into life beating down, beating 
down, and beating down each other. 
Look for those religious administrations 
that draw men together ; that inspire 
good will ; that teach patience and 
gentleness and forbearance. Look 
for sweetness, and not for bitterness. 
Look for a forgiving spirit, and not 
for unrelentingness. Demand and 
secure, in the religion of the coming 
day, in the Church that is to be, all 
that there is of mercifulness without 
impugning the strictness of justice ; 
all that there is of gentleness without 
taking from the strength of the bones 
of responsibility. 

2161. Generic Unity ; Specific Vari- 
ation. — Nothing would be more in- 
structive than to hear the house- 
keepers in a neighborhood discuss 
each other's economy. Each is care- 
ful in some direction, and profuse in 
another ; and each criticises the 
others' profuseness. But economy is 
a question of final results, and not of 
special methods. All through differ- 
ent households you find disagreement 
in specifics and agreement in generics. 
Now, throughout the world, churches 
are artificial households. And they 
are good households. There are 
sects, scores of them, as there ought 
to be ; and though they specifically 
differ, they are generically promoting 
good morals, inspiring spiritual appe- 
tites, and lifting men up from the 
plane of the passions to the plane of 
the moial sentiments. They are teach- 
ing men to live, not by sight, but by 
faith. And one does it in one way, 
and another does it another way. 
One does it by ordinances and symbols, 



460 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



another by silence and by the teach- 
ing of the Spirit, and another by intel- 
lectual disquisitions. And so there is 
some general unity between them, 
thougli they are running in their own 
ruts and channels. 

2162. Mutual Recognition of Sects. 
— Why cannot common sense prevail 
among men that are divided into 
different cliques in religion, but are 
all seeking one immortality, are all 
seeking the one disposition by which 
they shall learn the thing that shall 
immortalize them ? Do not let us 
quarrel and steal sheep out of each 
other's pasture, and then think it is a 
triumph and glorification. 

2163. Preachers from Other De- 
nominations. — If a congregational 
church wants a Methodist Ur. New- 
man, and they hear him with profit, 
he has a right to stay there. His ex- 
terior relations may remain with the 
Methodists, and there is no harm in 
that. I do not care where the roots 
of the tree pasture that hangs over my 
wall and gives me pears. And if all 
the glow and enthusiasm and life of 
our Methodist brethren can be carried 
into the formalities of some of our 
other churches I think it would be a 
great blessing. 

2164. Concord, not Unison. — Na- 
ture abhors organic unity, as she was 
said in old times to abhor a vacuum. 
Nature is contriving after differences 
all the time. She strives for har- 
mony ; never for unity, except in that 
sense. Harmony is not a monotone. 
Harmony is not unison. It is con- 
cordant differences. To-day, the 
reigning idea in most of the churches 
is that we are to labor for an ideal 
oneness ; that we are to labor for one- 
ness in thought, oneness in worship, 
oneness in organization. The idea of 
a church that all the world round is 
repeating precisely on the same hour 



of the same day in every latitude and 
everywhere one monotone : call that 
a grand and glorious idea ? It is at 
discord with the Divine idea. It is 
running against the genius of creation. 

2165. Church Interchange Whole- 
some. — The sooner it is understood 
that churches and sects are just what 
States are in this government, the 
better it will be. A man is born in 
Connecticut, and he thinks it is the 
best State in the Union — until he sees 
some other. And when he gets out 
of it, he does not forget his native 
State. He goes to New York, and 
settles there ; but does anybody think 
of saying to him, "Turncoat! turn- 
coat! " It is a part of our civic lib- 
erty that a citizen of one State is a 
citizen of every State. And it ought 
to be so in church organization. 

2166. Institutions of Religion. — 
There is the same difference between 
the Church and religion that there is 
between the hand and the soul. The 
hand is important, and I do not pro- 
pose to cut it off; but if it is a choice 
between the hand and the soul, I 
know which I should choose. Now 
churches, and seminaries, and Chris- 
tian institutions of all kinds are feet 
with which religion walks. They are 
hands with which it helps itself. They 
are instruments which God employs in 
carrying it forward. But when a 
comparison is made between institu- 
tions or ordinances and the things 
which they serve, there is no question 
which is superior. 

2167. The Church and Religion. — 
It is said that churchism is wearing 
out ; that men no longer frequent the 
house of God. Church-going never 
has been a besetting sin. I think men 
go fully as much as ever they did. 
But, even if it were true that churches 
are wearing out, churches are one 
thing, and religion is another. The 



THE CHURCH 



461 



church is no more religion than the 
masonry of the aqueduct is the water 
that flows in it. Schools are a very 
different thing from intelligence, 
though intelligence uses them as in- 
struments ; so churches are merely 
instruments of religion. They may 
vary; the truth remains the same. 

But besides this, the spirit of man, 
in religion, intermits. There has never 
been a steady growth in anything, 
neither in the discoveries of science, 
nor in the progress of government, 
nor in religious life. Always, growth 
comes by intermissions, and it would 
not be strange if it should be so in 
the Church. If, then, there were now 
a decadence of interest in religion, it 
might show simply that we are in one 
of these stages of temporary inactiv- 
ity. But I do not believe the fact to 
be as it is stated. 

2168. The Best Church. — Jona- 
than Edwards wrote his Treatise on 
the Will (one of the most extraordinary 
pieces of human thought and inge- 
nuity on record) on a pine table of 
most execrable construction, in a little 
room not so large as my platform, 
sitting in a hard, splint-bottomed arm- 
chair. Now suppose that a school of 
philosophers should be found quarrel- 
ing with a man that produces another 
Treatise on the Will equally great, by 
attempting to ascertain whether he 
wrote it in a room eight by twelve, 
whether he wrote it on a pine table, 
every one of whose legs creaked, 
whether he wrote it sitting in a splint- 
bottomed armchair, and whether he 
wrote it on paper of a given age and 
with a goose-quill of a given pattern : 
they would resemble exactly the dis- 
putes that I see among churches as to 
whether this one or the other one has 
is the true Church. The room that 
has a man in it who can turn out a 
treatise like that of Ed-djards on the 



Will is one to be highly honored. 
I care nothing about the room ; it is 
the Treatise that gives power to the 
room, and not the room that gives 
power to the Treatise. What care I 
whether a man is made in a Quaker 
Church or in an Episcopal Church ? 
These are all shops, and the doc- 
trines are tools, and the members are 
merely workmen. I care nothing for 
the shop if it does got give me good 
work, whether the shop be made of 
gold or of clay. I take the work, and 
not the shop. 

2169. The Value of Churchly Forms. 
— I am not one of those who say that 
repeating the sacred Creed, or per- 
forming pilgrimages, and fastings, and 
penances, and mortifications, or be- 
stowing gifts and charities, is all use- 
less. On the contrary, if I see a man 
who by repeating his Credo, or his 
Ave, or his Pater Nosier is made more 
devout, I say, "That does him good 
in the proportion in which it makes 
him more devout." If a proud man 
performs penances and mortifications, 
and it humbles him, I say, " It does 
him good so far as it humbles him." 
These things are instruments ; and if 
they work out any good in a man, 
they are valuable for just that; but 
for nothing else. They are school- 
masters ; and they are good if they 
teach man, who is their pupil. But 
in the time of the Reformers it was 
thought that there was intrinsic merit 
in them, independent of what they did 
in a man. 

2170. Communities, not Institutions. 
— I would not speak one word to 
undervalue the Church ; but if a man 
be a hunter, after he has fired, does 
he look into the rifle, or where the 
game is ? And am I to look into the 
Church and the Bible, or at the con- 
dition of my fellow-men, to see the 
result of Christianity ? Any good in- 



462 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



stitution, wliose design is to affect the 
whole community, must be studied 
first in the community, and not in the 
institution. 

2171. Value and Peril of Priest- 
hood. — In general, according to the 
civilization and knowledge of the 
globe, the priesthood represent the 
best elements of human nature, and 
strive to draw people up to those 
elements ; but when they are organ- 
ized as a class, with peculiar privi- 
leges, when they gather wealth to 
themselves, and when political power 
comes into their hands as well, then 
they become a very dangerous class. 
It is dangerous in a great community 
to have any class which is immovable, 
and in which there is no circulation 
from the bottom to the top. 

2172. The Apostolic Quality. — Oh ! 
that those men who are so fond of 
finding the Apostles could only find 
the inside as well as the outside. What 
they seem to seek is the Apostles' old 
coats, their old linen, their cast-off 
garments — not that glowing soul of 
cathoHcity, not that large element of 
true and manly love, not that broad 
sense of liberty, not that intense feel- 
ing of personal independence, which 
was in Paul, and which was in the 
Master before him. 

2173. Proselyting. — Let us not use 
our liberty to destroy those who are 
weaker in faith and in intelligence 
than we are. If priests are afraid to 
let their people come to this church, 
then they do not understand me. I 
have never said a word against any 
other church, that I know of, since I 
have been a minister. I criticise be- 
liefs freely, and always will ; but I 
never lifted my hand to proselyte a 
person. I never strove to take a per- 
son out of one religion and put him 
into another. The kingdom of Christ 
is not profited by such a process, any 



more than I am by taking a ten-dollar 
bill out of one pocket and putting it 
into another. 

2174. Church Exclusiveness. — Here 
is a miserable old cinnamon rose, that 
does not bear blossoms to amount to 
anything ; but it is very proud be- 
cause it stands in rich, yellow loam. 
And it has great contempt for that 
damask rose, which stands in gravel 
and naturally poor soil, although it is 
covered with fine blossoms, and will 
not commune with it. Why ? Because 
it stands in sacred yellow loam, itself ! 
It makes no account of the fact that 
it has poorer leaves and poorer blos- 
soms, and is poorer every way, than 
the other rose. And so it is often 
with Christians. You shall see poor, 
starveling Christians in fair pots, and 
rich, plump, blossoming Christians in 
poor pots. 

2175. The Worth of the Church. — 
No man need say anything against 
churches or ordinances ; for these are 
mere tools, they are mere imple- 
ments. Because you cannot eat the 
harrow or the plough, it does not fol- 
low that the harrow and plough are 
not good in raising wheat that you 
can eat. But it is the wheat, after all, 
that has the value — not the imple- 
ments by which you raise it. Al- 
though the tree that brings forth 
peaches, pears or apples cannot be 
eaten, nor its leaves, it is necessary 
that there should be a trunk, sap, and 
then the springing germ, and then 
the swelling and the ripening, and 
then the final dehciousness of the per- 
fected fruit. The fruit is what we 
want ; but you have got to have the 
instruments by which it is developed. 

2176, Curative Life-Power. — When 
a man has symptoms, when he is a 
little out of order, he doses, and gets 
worse — as he ought to ; and when 
churches are a little disordered they 



THEOLOGY 



463 



dose, and get a good deal worse. 
When a man is out of order physically, 
if he is abstemious, and his system 
has stamina, resiliency, vitality, he 
gets well. The doctor has the credit 
of curing him ; but it is his system that 
does the work. Nothing is so curative 
as life-power. That is the essential, 
in man or church. 

2177. Modern Religious Influence. 
— When the Ohio River, the mountain 
snow melting, swells up to the measure 
of its banks, and begins to overflow 
and overflow, the big Miami bottoms 
are one sheeted field of water ; and 
where I once lived — in Lawrenceburg, 
Indiana — I could take a boat and go 
twenty-five miles straight across the 
country, so vast was the volume. 
Now, suppose a man had taken a skiff 
and gone out over the fields and 
plumbed the depth and found only 
five feet of water, and had said, 
" Ah ! only five feet of water, and the 
Ohio had forty feet." Well the Ohio 



has not shrunk one inch. There are 
forty-five feet there, and there are five 
feet everywhere else. Religion used 
to be mainly in the Church, and men 
used to have to measure the Church 
in order to know how deep the rehgion 
was ; but there has been rain on the 
mountains and the moral feeling that 
exists in the community and in the 
world has overflowed the bounds of 
the Church, and you cannot measure 
the religious life or the religious im- 
pulse of this people unless you meas- 
ure their philanthropy, their house- 
hold virtue, and the general good will 
that prevails between classes and 
communities. 

The Church is not less than it has 
been, it is more than it ever was, but 
outside of it also there is a vast 
volume of that which can be regis- 
tered under no head so well as under 
that of rehgious influence, and which 
never existed in days gone by to the 
extent to which it exists now. 



XXX Fill. THEOLOGT 



2178. Theory not Practice. — Men 
sit around a tool-chest quarreling 
about saws and planes and chisels. 
They are not building anything ; they 
are debating about tools. They are 
fit to be a theological seminary. 

2179. Present and Future Knowl- 
edge. — There is no possibility of our 
knowing the truth except in part. 

Now, is like a crystal which some 
half-cleft rock discloses in part, more 
being yet buried than is laid open : a 
face or two, the fine, bounding lines, 
being visible, but receding into the 
opaque rock. T/ien is that crystal 
completely extricated, all its form 
being disclosed and held up in glorious 
light, to take and flash back again 
from all its sides the effulgence of 
divine light. 



2180. Mere Doctrinal Discussion. — 
What would you think of a husband- 
man who was not particularly careful 
of his mowing lot, or of his grain 
crops, or of his root crops, or of 
his orchard, or of his garden, but 
left them all in a sadly neglected 
state, because he was giving his 
whole time to the building of his 
fences? One large part of his time is 
employed in setting up his surveyor's 
instruments, and taking measure- 
ments, perhaps for the five hundredth 
time, of the boundaries of his farm. 
So he goes round and round his whole 
farm, marking out just where all the 
lines are. Then he begins to lay 
his fences. And oh ! such fences ! 
He must have the best that can be 
built. 



464 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



Did you never hear of spiritual hus- 
bandmen that were forever defining 
the great points of doctrine ; forever 
discriminating just the line between 
Calvinism and Arminianism, or be- 
tween High Calvinism and Low 
Calvinism ; forever drawing the dis- 
tinction between High-Church and 
Low-Church of every sort ; forever 
running round and round boundaries 
of the kingdom of God, making this 
place right here, and fixing that crook 
there ; building and rebuilding the 
middle walls of partition between one 
sect and another, but never sowing 
and never reaping ? Their farms are 
untilled and unfruitful. Their fences 
are all good, however. 

2181. Doctrines and Life. — Bring 
out our confessions of faith. They are 
called "skeletons of doctrine," and 
are well called so ; they are skele- 
tons. Christianity looks, in many of 
the e.xhibits that are made of it, in- 
tellectually and doctrinally, as a man 
would if he had been dead ten years, 
and there was nothing but his ghastly 
gaping skull left of him. But when 
Paul speaks of Christianity, he speaks 
of it as a life, which is glowing and 
beautiful. In other words, he goes to 
the fruit — to the quality of piety. Our 
theologians, to a very large extent, go 
to the doctrines or philosophies that it 
is supposed tend to make piety (they 
may or may not do it, as the case is) ; 
but the question of our sympathy is 
not to be with the plow and the harrow, 
but with the harvest. 

2182. Doctrinal Preaching. — I be- 
lieve in doctrines, with my explana- 
tions ; but I must use them. My 
duty is to take a plough, to fasten a 
team to it strong as eternity, and to 
put it into the soil, and to rip through 
the sod down to the subsoil, and to roust 
out all the vermin and the nibbling 
mice, and turn up the yellow dirt to 



the sun. No doctrine is good for any- 
thing that does not leave behind it an 
ethical furrow ready for the planting 
of seeds which shall spring up and 
bear abundant harvests. 

2183. Puzzles of Doctrines. — Doc- 
trinal difficulties are very much like 
such difficulties as a steed feels that is 
galled by an over-tight harness. If 
the owner goes and draws up the 
buckle one or two holes, will it relieve 
him ? The tighter you pull, the more 
you gall. And these morbid intel- 
lectual difficulties frequently become 
worse and worse by discussion. For 
they are insoluble, most of them. No 
man can frame the Infinite into a pro- 
portional form. No man can measure 
God or the infinite Divine government 
by words. 

2184. Divine Truth : Human State- 
ments. — Men make no distinction be- 
tween the Bible and the system which 
has been wrought out of the Bible, 
though there is just as much difference 
between the truth in the Bible and 
systems that are wrought out of it as 
there is between the iron ore from the 
mines of Pennsylvania and the im- 
plements that are forged out of that 
ore. You may make good tools out 
of the ore of the Bible ; but they are 
not Divine, for you made them. 

2185. What a Creed is — and is Not. 
— A creed is a good thing to teach a 
congregation by, and to catechise 
children by. It is good to lay down 
general points of beUef around which 
a congregation may gather. But a 
creed is not a whip of scorpions by 
which we are to lash each other's 
backs. 

2186. Danger of Creeds and Con- 
fessions. — Creeds and confessions, as 
helps and as histories are valuable, 
but as authorities they are the hands 
of dead men. Mortmain has been ad- 
judged to be so dangerous in all 



THEOLOGY 



465 



secular affairs that governments have 
restricted and destroyed it ; yet mort- 
main lies on the throat of the church 
to-day, and a man may not speak that 
which the dead men of three or four 
hundred years ago told him he must 
not speak. 

2187. Varying Views of Truth. — 
Nor can you find absolute unity of in- 
tellectualism in regard to high moral 
truths ; you never can find it on this 
earth. There are certain departments 
where men may come to unity, as in 
arithmetic and in mathematics ; that 
is to say, in the truths that represent 
materiality, and He low for the service 
of the world, men can come to approx- 
imate unity. But when you consider 
the infinite variations of men's genius, 
the attempt to make them see all 
things alike in the higher realm is use- 
less. You cannot take the realm of 
universal truth, and less and less in 
proportion as you go up, and make 
men see alike there. The men are 
not alike. The seer differs from the 
seer ; and the very structure of man, 
as approved and adjudicated by the 
experience of time, compels men to 
see truth in different colors. 

2188. Organized Variety of Human 
Nature. — How are you going to take 
men as they are made, and make 
them believe alike ? Some persons 
are so dry that you might soak them 
in a joke for a month, and it would 
not go through their skin. No ex- 
planation would suffice to make them 
understand it. They must accept it 
by faith if they accept it at all. And 
yet, there are other persons who are 
so sensitive to everything that is 
humorous or ludicrous that probably 
there is not a thing on earth that does 
not, first or last, suggest something 
funny to them. How are you going 
to take such minds, and make them 
look along the track of truth and see 



alike? They are made differently ; 
and it is not without a purpose. 
For variety — organized variety — is 
strength. 

2i8g. Doctrinal Intolerance. — They 
slew him because he could not say 
Shibboleth ; and that kind of slaying 
has been going on ever since. When 
in the ordinances men cannot say 
^/«/5boleth, but say 5z^boleth, they 
are slain with the sword of the church. 
Since there have been Christian de- 
nominations they have not given over 
making war one upon another on 
grounds as narrow as that. Every 
one mounts his conscience for some 
docrinal distinction ; and then he is 
riding the devil, — for a fiery con- 
science is nearer like the devil than 
anything else that we know anything 
about. 

2^ go. Apostolic Heresy. — Does it 
not seem strange to you to hear that 
John Knox was suspected of being 
heretical in Edinburgh ? or that Jona- 
than Edwards was suspected of being 
unsound in Northampton ? or that 
John Calvin was suspected of being 
lenient and lax in Geneva ? And 
does it not seem strange that St. Paul, 
in Jerusalem, was not regarded as 
having got up to the highest mark as 
a religious man ? So it was. It was 
not openly charged that he was not 
orthodox. There were rumors to that 
effect, but no charges — none what- 
ever. And so, after twenty years of 
earnest, faithful labor in almost all the 
civilized world, Paul came to Jerusa- 
lem to find that he was not " ortho- 
dox " according to the views of Chris- 
tians there. They held him in doubt. 
The Christian Jews had accepted 
Christ. They believed in him. And 
yet they could not bear to break away 
from the Temple, nor from the routine 
regularity of the Mosaic law. So, 
when they heard that Paul had no 



466 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



objection to circumcision, but did not 
care for it ; that he had no objection 
to sacrifice, but that he did not con- 
sider it as necessary, they said, " This 
Paul is an invader of settled opinions ; 
a dangerous man. He may be right ; 
but you cannot tell where all this will 
end. Probably he will go to Hellenic 
views, and become a teacher of false 
philosophies "—and that, because he 
held the whole economy of Moses in 
a higher sense, and with a nobler 
purpose, than they did who suspected 
him ! 

2191. Inspiration Progressive. — If 
there be one thing that is shown all 
the way through the divinely inspired 
record it is the adaptation of methods, 
institutions, and revelations of truth to 
the weaknesses and necessities of men 
in each particular age. The garment 
was made to fit the figure. The man- 
ner of teaching was in accordance 
with the need of the time and nation 
in which it took place. Not perfec- 
tion, but right direction, was the aim. 

2192. Early Christianity. — Sup- 
pose it were proposed to an armed 
city to pull down its walls, to level its 
bulwarks and fortifications, to open 
the doors of the citadel, and to throw 
away the muskets and the cannon? 
That would not sound much more 
strange to a military ear, as a mode 
of warfare, than it did in olden times 
to hear a man attempting to propagate 
a gospel that aimed to build up a new 
life begin by urging men to abandon 
all those forces by which they had 
ever accomplished anything in the 
field or in the forum. 

2193. Christianity, Original, and 
Improved. — I think it was Goethe who 
said, in view of the infinite commenta- 
tors who had criticised Faust in its 
First and Second Parts, that there 
were hundreds of meanings in that 
work which he never thought of, but 



which his critics had found out ; and 
it may be said that thousands of 
things have been discovered as being 
part and parcel of Christianity which 
never were thought of by its Founder, 
Christ, nor by his Father, God. 

2194. Human Knowledge Frag- 
mentary. — What would be known of a 
statue, if every part of the marble had 
been abraded except the chin ? We 
should know something about that ; 
we should know that it was a chin ; 
but what should we know of the rest ? 
And Paul says, in respect to the world 
in which we dwell, in respect to the 
great system of which we are parts. 
We know only in spots, here and 
there ; we know solitary facts, single 
relations, partial elements. 

2195. Theologizing. — Is there no 
difference between a thing and the 
philosophy of it ? A mother has been 
gone from home for two days, leaving 
her little babe, a year old, in the care 
of a friend ; and, when she comes 
back she rushes to the cradle and 
catches up the child, and covers it 
with kisses, and says ten thousand 
sweet, sensible follies to it; and I sit 
down and say to her, " Now, what do 
you understand to be the nature of 
motherly love ? What is there in that 
child that is so attractive to you ? " I 
am theologizing to that mother : all 
very proper in its place and time, but 
an ocean of philosophy would never 
start a rill of the thing itself. 

2196. Systematic Theology. — Sys- 
tematic theology includes in a general 
way, to be sure, a sound morahty, an 
mi perfect mental philosophy, an an- 
alysis of God's nature and govern- 
ment, in which good and evil, truth 
and fiction, are blended, as in Daniel's 
vision ; and this vision is an admirable 
description of the present condition of 
theology. The image's head was of 
fine gold, his breast and arms were of 



THEOLOGY 



467 



silver, his belly and thighs of brass, 
his legs of iron, his feet part iron and 
part clay. So stands theology to-day. 

2197. Antiquated Thought-Forms. 
— When civilization was as yet very 
imperfect, and government was as yet 
distraught, great nobles sought se- 
curity by building castles on emi- 
nences, and lived in them as in forts 
and fortifications. But the times grew 
better, and peace reigned, and men 
could come down, now, and live on 
the plains, and in pleasant houses and 
mansions ; and the old forts are for 
travelers to gaze at. So the intel- 
lectual and theological forts that men 
built in those troublous times of re- 
ligious persecution stand yet in our 
confessions of faith and in our creeds, 
and we are enjoined to live in them. 
But we are coming down on to the 
plains, and we shall abandon those old 
castles, not because they did not have 
truth in them, but because they had 
truth in them in such a mode of state- 
ment that, with the reigning disposi- 
tions and currents of public thought, 
they do not now produce the right 
impression. They may be true in a 
sense, and yet false in their effects 
upon mankind. 

2198. Changing Value of Creeds, — 
Catechism and creed may both have 
most important truths, and often in 
most unfortunate expression for per- 
manent value. For it is with thought 
a good deal as it is with dress. A 
man that should dress as our Lord 
did, with turban and robe — the boys 
would run after him in the street. A 
man that should bring into our Occi- 
dental life the details and peculiarities 
of Oriental desert life, or the life of 
the wilderness — men would justly re- 
proach him. And so it is. There be 
many things that fit a man for one 
age, or one country, but do not fit him 
for another. 



2199. Problem of Evil. — This has 
been the cob which men have been 
gnawing for a thousand years ; but no 
one ever got a kernel from it. It was a 
cob when they began gnawing it, and it 
is a cob yet. The origin of evil? 
The very system of creation originated 
evil. God chose to create such a state 
of things as exist ; and, he having 
chosen it, evil was organic, created, 
universal, characteristic, designed. 
It did not come in by accident ; it was 
put in on purpose. 

2200. Power of Calvinism, — You 
may put some musk in a chest, and 
when it is exposed to the air after 
three hundred years it will smell 
about as strong as when you put it 
there. Now old John Calvin lived in 
Geneva, and they have not been able 
to get him out ! That place smells 
strong of him to this hour ! Calvin- 
ism gave a conception of God as a 
God supreme, infinite, omnipotent, for 
justice, for rectitude. This was the 
power of Calvinism. There were 
other things belonging to it — such, 
for instance, as the "five points" — 
original sin, subjection of the will, 
Divine grace, predestination, and per- 
severance of the elect — but its grand 
central power was this : the dignity it 
gave to man in the character of a 
God presented to him as supreme 
Governor. 

2201. Calvinism and Arminianism. 
— What is a Calvinist? Any mind 
that is so constituted that it is in sym- 
pathy with intense ideas of governor 
and government is Calvinistic, A 
man, on the contrary, that has large 
benevolence and social feelings, and 
not large self-esteem and conscien- 
tiousness, is almost of necessity an 
Arminian. What is an Arminian, as 
thus distinguished from a Calvinist? 
He is one that is in sympathy with the 
governed, Calvinism goes for gov- 



4^)8 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



ernor and government : Arminianism 
goes for the people. They are botli 
of tliem partialisms, and they are 
both of them true. 

2202. Calvinism and Democracy. — 
We break our teeth trying to break 
the nuts of Calvinism. They are not 
nuts ; they are marbles : but they 
were the best that time could form. 
So long as the community had no 
knowledge of the rights of the indi- 
vidual, or of the interior spirit of the 
New Testament, it did not hurt any- 
body's feelings when it was said, 
"The King can do no wrong; we 
have no rights, and we must not 
meddle " ; but now what has come to 
pass in the growth of the human race 
and the better understanding of the 
Gospel? Men are emancipated. 
Every citizen is a factor in the gov- 
ernment. We are all of us partners, 
joint stockholders, and have a right 
to dividends of power everywhere. 

2203. Freedom of the Will. — Many 
men are swamped in the doctrines of 
election and predestination, but this 
is supreme impertinence. They are 
truths which belong to God, and if 
you are troubled by them, it is be- 
cause you are meddling with what 
does not belong to you. You only 
need to understand that all God's 
agencies are to assist you in gaining 
your salvation, if you will but use 
them rightly. To doubt this is as if 
men in a boat, pulling against the 
tide, and, with all their efforts, going 
backwards every hour, should by and 
by find the current turning, and see 
the wind springing up with it and 
filling the sails, and hear the man at 
the helm exclaim, " Row away, boys ! 
Wind and tide are in your favor," 
and they should all say, " What shall 
we do with the oars? Do not the 
wind and the tide take away our free 
agency ?' 



2204. Doctrine of Election. — The 
elect are whosoever will, and the non- 
elect whosoever won't. 

2205. Calvinistic Shadows. The 

fact is that the scoffers at the old 
Testament are really all the time firing 
at the construction that is put upon 
these things by the theologians of the 
old Calvinistic church. If you say 
Calvinism is not believed in any 
longer, what is the reason they get 
angry when I attack it ? I do not at- 
tack it because I am fond of firing 
into the dust-heap of old theology, 
but because the influences of it still 
hang in the heavens as a cloud to 
hide the glory of God. It is for 
Christ's sake, and for humanity's 
sake that I would contend against the 
fictions and burn all the dreams of 
the old medieval theologians. 

2206. The Religion of Fate. — They 
have preached such theological views 
as misrepresented human nature, man 
and God to the world. The doctrine 
was taught that man was born cor- 
rupt into the world, dislocated and at 
variance both with knowledge and 
with all forms of moral purity, abso- 
lutely helpless, and to be saved only 
by an act of Divine special volition ; 
utterly unable to procure that act by 
anything that he does, either by tears, 
or persuasions, or endeavors of his 
own, but depending absolutely upon 
the uncovenanted free will of God ; 
and that only a small part would ever 
become the subjects of that free will, 
while the rest would go glooming, 
darkling, moaning down to perdition 
by a stream of fate that was as irresist- 
ible to them as Niagara would be to an 
infant. This did make it seem as 
though religion was a terrible thing — 
nothing so terrible, except the want 
of it. 

2207. A Worn-out Creed. — God so 
loi'ed the world that he gave his Son 



THEOLOGY 



469 



to die for it. Any view of the Divine 
nature that makes him first angry, 
and then placated, is blasphemous. 
It is not only not orthodox, but it is 
as heterodox as hell. God's brooding 
love, not God's irritable law, is the 
doctrine of the Bible. I have written 
on that subject and preached on that 
subject, and have been criticised in 
this wise : " Mr. Beecher knows when 
he is making these onslaughts that he 
is beating down a man of straw." 
No, I am not beating down a man of 
straw ; I am beating a mummy that 
still stands in its environments in the 
confessions of the world to-day, and 
that every generation of ministers 
swears to believe in and preach. But 
the point that I make is not that these 
mummies are believed in very widely, 
it is that the popular impression is 
derived from these representations of 
the creeds, and that the men who are 
to preach them — nineteen out of every 
twenty, ninety-nine out of every hun- 
dred — do not believe in them. 

2208. Varied Ripening-time of 
Truths. — All truths are not indeed 
alike important, and all truths do not 
show the effects of being believed or 
rejected with equal rapidity. There 
are many truths which bear such a 
relation to our everyday life, that the 
fruit of believing or rejecting appears 
almost at once. These are spring 
truths, that come up and bear fruit 
early in the season. There are other 
truths that require time for working 
out their results. They are summer 
truths, and the fruit of belief or dis- 
belief does not ripen till July or 
August. Other truths, in respect to 
showing the results of belief or disbe- 
lief, are like late autumnal fruits, that 
require the whole winter to develop 
their proper juices. In these last the 
connection is just as certain, although 
it is longer in making itself appear, as 



in the first, where the distance be- 
tween cause and effect is shortest, and 
the development is most rapid. . . . 
But there is no way of holding any 
great rehgious truth that does not, first 
or last, work out a result answering 
exactly to the nature of the thing 
believed. 

2209. The Garden of Eden. — 
Among the legends that are grouped 
in the earlier portions of Genesis stands 
the Garden-Parable of Eden and our 
first parents. If treated as a poem, in 
literature, conveying the simplicity of 
the earliest notions of the origin of the 
Human Family, it is both harmless 
and pleasing. If treated as fact, it 
loses all its color, and withers as a 
flower in the desert. If treated as 
theology has for a thousand years 
treated it, it is an awful morass, out 
of which have flowed down streams 
of mischief, and filled the sphere of 
religion with dreary and poisonous 
influences. 

2210. Scriptural Treatment of Adam. 
— There is idyllic beauty in the vision 
of a blessed garden inhabited by two 
ignorant and innocent beings ; the 
simple story that their wrongdoing 
led to unhappiness and expulsion is a 
good moral for children. There let 
it rest — harmless and even beautiful ! 
There the whole Old Testament lets it 
rest. No priest, lawgiver, or prophet 
makes this legend a part of his in- 
struction. The legend dies out. Not 
once does Jesus speak of it. Only 
Paul touches it. The fall of Adam 
and the imputation of his guilt to all 
his posterity was a bastard belief of 
the Jews, grown up, with other glosses 
and absurdities of Pharisaic theol- 
ogy, outside of Scriptural authority or 
teaching ; and the Apostle, neither 
denying nor affirming it, but alluding 
to it as a theory familiar to his readers, 
based upon it the great truth that 



470 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



Christ broiiglu into life a remedy for 
all its ills. It was Christ's moral suf- 
iiciency to heal all evil — no matter 
how it was supposed to have entered 
the world, even if through Adam — 
that was in Paul's heart. 

221 1. The Fall of Man. — The whole 
civilized Christianity of the world 
hitherto has been based upon the 
doctrine of the fall of the whole hu- 
man family in Adam. Man never did 
fall ; men never could fall because all 
men were born at the bottom ; and if 
there has been any turn at all, it has 
been upward. There is not a word in 
the whole Bible about a fallen world. 
There is not a word in the whole Bible 
about a lost world. Christ came to 
seek and to save the lost. Multitudes 
of men have been lost, and many 
found ; but that is never spoken of 
the human race, nor of the whole 
world : and yet it is the absolute foun- 
dation on which the current theolo- 
gies, and the theologies of the past 
have been based. 

2212. Responsibility for Adam. — 
Suppose a man should call his five 
children, and begin, in the order of 
their ages, and give each of them a 
good sound whipping ; suppose he 
should say to them, "Off with your 
jackets!" and give it to them; sup- 
pose they, standing around and cry- 
ing, should ask, " Father, why is 
this?" and he should reply, "Your 
great-grandfather jumped over into an 
orchard and stole some apples — that 
is what it is for ! " The idea is enough 
to make one laugh. How misleading 
would be such a figure employed to 
interpret the nature of God's justice ! 

2213. "In Adam's Fall." That 
after such imputation of sin that men 
knew nothing about, God should have 
gone on and turned the crank of crea- 
tion, and multiplied them, and 
multiplied them, and multiplied them, 



swarming the earth with them in 
every generation — why, how long 
would you let a man with smallpox 
wander up and down the world ? But 
suppose a man were to create it, and 
should be suffered to go into society ! 
All the instincts of jusdce, all the 
humanities, rise up against the con- 
tinued creation of inevitable and 
unbounded evil. Yet men have been 
taught by the ascetic medieval and 
scholastic theology that God has done 
it, — and on the pattern of infinity. 

2214. Doctrinal Differences. — How 
about toleration when men hold such 
doctrines as the absolute ruin of the 
human race in Adam's fall ; and 
■where they hold and teach that in 
consequence of that ruin the whole 
world is lost, that men are going to 
hell, and that hell is everlasting ? I 
hold neither. I could not. I could 
sooner take hold of a red-hot sword 
and wield it than attempt to take 
hold of a theology of that kind and 
wield it. Nor do I see how anybody 
can do it. Nevertheless, I do see how 
men form their conclusions, and how 
they hold them. 

2215. No Original Righteousness. 
— Every man is born at zero. He is 
nothing at first. We are told that 
men are born without original right- 
eousness : but this is not half of it ; 
they are born without original any- 
thing, except a little sack of pulpy 
matter. The supreme function at 
birth is suction. Men are born with- 
out a name and without a trade. 
They are born without power to walk, 
without power to handle anything, 
without power to see, and without 
power to hear. Their senses are not 
born until they have been in the 
world months and months. It is a 
mere seed that is born. When, 
therefore, I am told that men are born 
without original righteousness, I do 



THEOLOGY 



471 



not find any difficulty in believing 
that. 

22 1 6. Cruel Views of God. — Some 
of the noblest, the whitest-lifed men 
that ever lived have held the most 
horrible views in regard to God, 
human life and destiny that it is pos- 
sible to conceive of ; and when I look 
at them, and see out of what soil they 
grew, I can liken them to nothing but 
a white flower growing out of a dung- 
hill. The ground in which their roots 
are is accursed ; and yet they are 
beautiful, and their lives are fra- 
grant. 

2217. Christ Variously Preached. — 
Some of the sweetest men in the world 
hold a barbaric view of God and the 
world, and their lives are as sweet as 
the heart of Jesus. It is not for me 
to account for these things. I thank 
God for the hves of such men ; and if 
they can take those doctrines, and can 
get honey out of the lion, for God's 
sake let them use lions for that pur- 
pose ! But I do not cultivate them 
for the purpose of getting any honey 
out of them. I receive these men, 
though. As far apart as is possible in 
the interpretation of Scripture are we ; 
as wide apart are we in the interpreta- 
tion of Divine Providence as the gulf 
between heaven and earth : but love 
can put a bridge over any gulf, no 
matter how wide ; and I see them 
serve Christ, and I receive them, 
notwithstanding all our doctrinal dif- 
ferences. 

2218. Striving Against the Light. — 
Often, the men that are opposed to the 
hopeful views and to the theology out 
of which they spring, are neverthe- 
less unconsciously working for God. 
There are some men who go to heaven 
with their faces thitherward. There 
are some men who will back into 
heaven. They fight all the way 
against that very influence which is to 



be their salvation, and the salvation 
of the world. 

2219. Futureof the Wicked. — Some- 
times, in the dark caves, men have 
gone to the edge of unspeaking 
precipices, and wondering what was 
the depth, have cast down fragments 
of rock, and listened for the report of 
the fall, that they might judge how 
deep that blackness was ; and listen- 
ing — still hstening — no sound returns ; 
no sudden plash, no clinking stroke as 
of rock against rock — nothing but 
silence, utter silence ! And so I stand 
upon the precipice of life. I sound the 
depths of the other world with curious 
inquiries. But from it comes no echo 
and no answer to my questions. No 
analogies can grapple and bring up 
from the depths of the darkness of the 
future world of the wicked the prob- 
able truths. No philosophy has line 
and plummet long enough to sound 
the depths. 

2220. Interchange of Theologies. — 
The great plains of the West grow 
more corn than they want. In the 
East we make more goods than we 
want. They receive the goods they 
want, and we receive the corn we 
want, and so we interchange. I think 
if I had somebody to teach me a little 
more logic, and I taught some others 
a little more liberty, we should all be 
better for it. If I had alongside of 
me somebody that believed in hell-fire 
and damnation, and I opened my 
views to him of salvation and the 
eternity of the heavens, possibly, at 
least, he might be better off. 

2221. The Proving of Doctrines. — 
Let one say to me, who could neither 
write nor read : " Take that type and 
put it down there ; now take that 
one and put it down there," and so 
go through ten or fifteen types until 
they spell out my name. I do not 
know how to read, or write, or spell, 



472 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



but I obey, and take the separate 
types and ]nit them one after the 
other. Then 1 bring up some man and 
say, "What does that spell?" " Henry 
Ward Beecher." He said it would 
come out so. If a chemist were to 
come and say to you, who were un- 
acquainted with substances : " Take 
one-quarter portion of that clement, 
and take just exactly so much meas- 
ured portion of that element, and so 
much of that element." What does 
it come to ? Cologne water. . . . 
"How do you prove it ? " you ask. 
"Try it, that will prove it." You 
must give practical trial of your doc- 
trines if you would prove them. 

2222. New Truths. — When the 
question is, How shall truths authen- 
ticate themselves, and gain a lodg- 
ment in the minds of men ? then it is 
important to know what bow sends 
them ; but after they have been sent, 
after they have struck, after they have 
been admitted to be truths, after they 
have proved themselves to be divine, 
then it makes no difference whether 
they came in from the power of 
prophecy or from the force of science. 

2223. To-day Needs To-day's 
Thought. — You might as well go to 
the catacombs of Egypt and scrape 
up the dust of the mummies, and 
knead it into forms, and bake them in 
your oven, and call such things men, 
and present them, as citizens and 
teachers, for our regard, as to bring 
old, time-worn institutions to serve the 
growth and the living wants of to- 
day. 

2224. The Old and the New. — The 
condition of things in religion and 
medicine is very nearly the same. 
The regular Orthodox Church looks 
upon all new movements in religion 
with disestcem, and pronounces vari- 
ations from the standards of the past 
to be heterodox. They know that 



they are right, and that those who do 
not agree with them are wrong. On 
the other hand, the men of new ideas 
and new light insist upon it that the 
old religions have grown musty, and 
no longer represent the disclosures of 
truth made through nature and sci- 
ence to our times. So they stand over 
against the Church. The old think 
the new to be vagrant, restless, run- 
ning after novelties ; and the new 
think the old to be bigoted. Both of 
them are selfish, because both are 
human. It therefore comes to pass 
that in almost every department of 
life there are the old and the new, the 
conservative and the progressive, the 
orthodox and the heterodox, opposed 
to each other. 

2225. Liberty in Religious Think- 
ing. — Along down through the ages 
nothing has been so much distrusted 
as the average experience, wisdom 
and conscience of the great mass of 
the common people ; but in the ex- 
periment which our nation has been 
working out, God has shown the world 
at last that in all things commercial, 
in all things industrial, in all things 
moral, in all things civic and govern- 
mental, it is safe to trust the common 
people. There is still the barbaric, 
despotic, monarchic doctrine that the 
people are not to be trusted in the 
matter of religion, and in that only. 
But I hold that God's will covers that 
ground just as much as it does every 
other ground in human life and so- 
ciety. For liberty corrects its own 
mistakes in a little time. That which 
claims to be truth is on trial when first 
announced. When on trial, if it fails, 
it is not true, and men reject it. There 
is a steady agitation in an intelligent 
and reasonably well-educated and 
moral population, that is perpetually 
acting like a bolter of grain, sifting 
and leaving the chaff behind. 



THEOLOGY 



473 



2226. Temptation of the " Liberal." 
— How many times do we find persons, 
as they are developing into a higher 
religious life, who feel, as the first 
fruits of their spiritual liberty, con- 
tempt for their past selves, and con- 
tempt for other people who are in 
that state from which they have just 
emerged ! But let me say that con- 
tempt is not a Christian grace. This 
you would do well to put down in 
your memorandum book ; for a great 
many of you think it is ! 

Contempt, you know is a crow, that 
cries, " Caw, caw, caw ! " Pity is the 
egg that hatched the crow. When 
you see one man showing pity for an- 
other, just get him a little mad, and it 
is contempt instantly. We begin by 
pitying men who do not know as much 
as we do ; and then, because they 
will not mind us, we feel contempt for 
them. 

2227. Puritanism, — The idea of Hfe 
to the old Puritans was stern on ac- 
count of the spirit of the age in which 
they lived. They forbore pleasures 
because those had been so prostituted 
and perverted. They had such an 
intense sense of the final results of 
human life in this world that they 
were apt to seek only things that were 
solid and profitable. In some minds 
the old-fashioned doctrines were like 
the old-fashioned wagons, the box of 
which was set right down on the axle- 
tree, so that every single pebble over 
which the wheels ran caused a jolt 
which was distinctly felt. Now come 
the younger sons ; and they want to 
put springs under the box ; but the 
father says, " You were not brought 
up so. Keep to the old solid riding. 
That is the true kind." 

2228. Sermon on the Mount : Past 
and Future. — One would scarcely 
know from the Sermon on the Mount 
whether the Jews had altar or temple, 



priests or ritual. The pure wheat is 
here garnered ; the straw and chaff, 
so needful for its growth, but now in 
its ripeness so useless, and even per- 
nicious, were cleared away. It is a 
discourse of the past for the sake of 
the future. 

To interpret the Sermon on the 
Mount as the charter of Christianity, 
is to misconceive not only this dis- 
course, but the very nature of Chris- 
tianity itself, which is not a system of 
new truths, but a higher development 
of existing forces. 

2229. Infidelity as to Primitive Rev- 
elation. — Science is but the decipher- 
ing of God's thought as revealed in 
the structure of this world ; it is a 
mere translation of God's primitive 
revelation. If to reject God's revela- 
tion of the Book is infidehty, what is 
it to reject God's revelation of himself 
in the structure of the whole globe ? 

2230. The Revelation of the Rocks. 
— With what eagerness has the world 
heard of the discovery in Egypt of the 
tomb that contained the buried kings 
of the Pharaohnic dynasty ! But what 
are all these mighty kings, wrapped 
for three thousand years in the shroud 
of silence, compared with the discov- 
ery of God's method and the results 
of creation millions of centuries ago, 
retained in the rocks ? Were the two 
tables of stone, written by the finger 
of God, a memorial to be revered, 
and their contents to be written in let- 
ters of gold in all men's churches, and 
yet his ministers and priests turn with 
indifference or with denunciation, even 
with scorn, sometimes, from the litera- 
ture of the rocks written by the hand 
of God all over the earth ? 

2231. New Light. — There are two 
ways in which these new develop- 
ments of scientific truth may be met. 
One is by stubborn refusal, and the 
other is by modified acceptance. If, 



474 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



on tlie one side, men receive the new 
light that God is bringing into the 
world, but refuse the Gospel, and go 
off, they will be like men in the North 
who are taking a voyage on an ice- 
berg. They will sail on the sides of 
politics and of cold intellectual, scien- 
tific results, without affinities, without 
warmth, without summer, except a 
summer that would melt the very 
foundations on which they stand. On 
the other hand, if, afraid, the Church 
refuses this light, then the Church is 
like a man who is in a dungeon. The 
sun is shining, and the summer is 
coming, but he is none the wiser. 

2232. Time for Changes. — France 
is better to-day because she had a 
revolution, horrible as that revolution 
was. Many a man is better to-day 
because he had a bilious fever, and 
was cleansed by the remedies which 
he was obliged to take ; and I think 
that when you look at the list of vict- 
uals which the Church has eaten for 
the last thousand and a half years, 
you will all agree that a little purga- 
tion would not do it any harm ! 

2233. Theological Transitions. — 
When Galileo discovered the truths 
of astronomy, and was rebuked by 
the Church, the Church authorities 
thought that all their beliefs would be 
swept away if the prevalent notions 
about the world should be uprooted. 
They attempted to stop the sun in his 
course, and the earth in its course. 
IJiit not long after that the growing 
light emancipated men's minds ; the 
reformation took place, and Europe 
was deluged with new spiritual in- 
fluences. The very light which led 
Galileo to his great discoveries was 
the twilight or dawn of that great re- 
ligious movement which emancipated 
the human race. 

You may be sure that anything that 
shakes men to the very bottom, that 



enlarges their sense of the universe, 
while for the first moment it may put 
back their distinctive religious feeling, 
will, in the end, give power to it. And 
although the present discussions, both 
in literature and in science, may seem 
to be bringing the name of Christ 
away from the honor and the glory of 
days gone by, we need only wait for 
the night to roll away, when the morn- 
ing of the new era will come, and the 
thought of God, the thought of Christ 
and the thought of eternal life will 
deepen and rise with a majesty of 
power unknown to any of the days 
gone by. We are standing at a great 
epoch. This is a transition period. 

2234. Progress Conditioned on 
Movement. — Men say, " If you let go 
the old, standing doctrines, where are 
you going to swing to?" Well, if 
you were to put a child in a boat, fast- 
ened to a wharf by a painter, and take 
away his oar, and still leave him a 
child, and then unfasten the rope, and 
let him go, what would become of 
him ? What would ? But if a man is 
a man, and has a pair of oars, we let 
go the painter without any hesitation, 
because he is able to take care of the 
boat himself; he is skilled, and the 
instruments of propulsion and guid- 
ance are with him ; and to let him go 
from the wharf is not a mischief, but 
the very condition of progress. 

If men were still children, or if the 
world were yet in an inchoate condi- 
tion, it might be necessary — as it was 
— to put up a great many fences ; it 
might be necessary to establish a 
great many dogmas and creeds : but 
after, by the experience of these 
truths, even in their imperfect condi- 
tion, you have raised up a Christian 
conscience, you have raised up a 
spiritual, discerning sense ; when you 
have equipped men, and carried them 
so far along a spiritual education that 



THEOLOGY 



475 



they can discern what is right and 
what is wrong, then the stabiHty of the 
Church does not turn on its articles 
of faith, but on the Hves of its mem- 
bers ; and the power and safety of the 
Church lies in its living force, not in 
its intellectual force ; in its dispositions 
of love, joy, sympathy, genuine phil- 
anthropy ; and about these things 
there are no differences among men. 

2235. Paul a Darwinian. — Paul's 
doctrine of double consciousness, as set 
forth in the seventh chapter of Ro- 
mans, is, that there is a law of the spirit 
and a law of the members ; that there 
is the higher I, and a lower I ; that 
there are passions and appetites which 
have in them no moral character, — 
that is, which are not holy, which are 
not necessarily unholy, but which are 
not of the moral nature, which are 
animal, which are fleshly. There is, 
he teaches, a power that is triumphant 
over these lower faculties. Men have 
been reading this for ages ; yet when 
Mr. Darwin says, " Man is first 
animal, and afterwards he is de- 
veloped into a spiritual being super- 
induced on the animal," they start 
back, and say, " Is it not the devil 
coming out of hell that is plowing 
at the face of the old theology ? ' ' 
Before Mr. Darwin was thought of, 
his great-great-great-grandfather Paul 
had been a Darwinian, and had 
taught that every man is two men, 
and that one of the men is an animal, 
while the other is a spiritual creature. 

He had carried his argument right 
through with an intuition that scents 
the theory, without unfolding a philos- 
ophy and proving all the steps. In 
looking through his moral conscious- 
ness he came to that conclusion. 

2236. Evolution among Scientists. 
— The theory of Evolution is the 
working theory of every department 
of physical science all over the world. 



Withdraw this theory, and every de- 
partment of physical research would 
fall back into heaps of hopelessly dis- 
located facts, with no more order or 
reason or philosophical coherence than 
exists in a basket of marbles, or in the 
ju.xtaposition of the multitudinous 
sands of the seashore. We should 
go back into chaos if we took out of 
the laboratories, out of the dissecting- 
rooms, out of the fields of investiga- 
tion, this great doctrine of Evolution. 
2237. Creative Design by Evolution . 
— Here is a vast system running 
through the ages, a system that has in 
general one single tendency, namely : 
the things that are poor go under, and 
the things that are better survive, and 
the better yet still overtop them and 
go on, and this has been so through 
ages and running through vast spheres 
of dispensation, and all of them 
working together and working har- 
moniously. Is there no evidence of 
design with regard to this vast system 
and its tendencies? . . . There is a 
carpet-loom, a great power-loom, and 
when you stand before it you almost 
think the thing ought to vote, it looks 
so intelligent. Now, if you were to 
see an Oriental woman squatting upon 
the ground and making exquisite rugs, 
putting in bits here and there, thrust- 
ing in the shuttle once in a while and 
fixing it, and by and by comes out in 
glowing colors a beautiful carpet, you 
say, " What a magnificent design ! of 
course somebody did it." But sup- 
pose a man can make a machine that 
can do all this, is not that man a 
designer much greater than were the 
women who were making these in- 
dividual rugs? The man who can 
create the greater design for produc- 
ing these inferior executions is greater 
than the one who can merely do the 
inferior things. And the development 
of the method of God in the whole 



476 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



universe, wlieii it comes to be looked 
at from tlic higher point of view, is a 
subhnier evidence of design than the 
creation and the continuance of this 

globe. 

2238. The Darwinian Hypothesis. — 
I am not now undertaking to say that 
this human development from the 
animal kingdom is proved. It is but 
a hypothesis ; but if the hypothesis 
answers all the varied conditions that 
you apply to it, — if it has a plan and 
a solution in it, then it is taken for 
truth. Do you know that three-fourths 
of all that you believe in common 
daily life is merely hypothesis ? When 
a man finds ocean shells on the top of 
a mountain, he says, "It is evident 
that this was once the bottom of the 
sea. Here are signs and marks that 
there has been a change, that the 
earth has been heaved up, and that 
some parts of it were raised while 
other parts were depressed." Every- 
body but a theologian would say, 
"Yes, that is true;" but some old 
theologian would say, " No, no, God 
could just as well create shells as he 
could flowers ; and he could just as 
well create them on the tops of moun- 
tains as he could in the bottom of the 
sea ; and you cannot prove that he 
did not create them on the tops of 
mountains." 

2239. The New View of Sin. — 
When you teach men that they 
are guilty of Adam's sin they will 
laugh in your face. When you in- 
terpret to a man his body, his appetites 
and his passions, and then put him to 
looking inwardly, he cannot dispute 
that he is sinful. And I say that the 
doctrine of sin as it is coming to be 
understood by some, and more and 
more by many — a doctrine founded 
on the conflict between the original 
animal man and the superinduced 
reasoning man — is going to throw a 



Hood of light upon the world which 
will be far more truthful than the old 
doctrine, and will give a power to the 
preaching of the Gospel which it never 
had before. 

2240. Spiritual Enrichment of the 
New Era. — I hail the incoming of new 
thought ; and though it is wasteful, I 
remember that all great developments 
are wasteful. Everything that has 
lifted the world one stage higher has 
done so with waste. It is wasteful 
when the plough goes through the 
turf-bound field. How many roots it 
wastes, rolhng them over and under 
the clod ! How many insects it de- 
stroys, as it crushes them ! How many 
flowers such as the daisy, that Burns 
so sweetly sang, are passed over and 
perish ! Nevertheless, when the new 
harvest is gathered in, and the reap- 
ers' song is heard floating on the 
evening air, who regrets the waste that 
the plough made in the old, untilled 
and turf-bound field ? Yes, not only 
have we arrived, I think, at an epoch 
of a greater knowledge of nature and 
of science, but science itself is bring- 
ing us to a realm of spiritual and 
religious life and beliefs such as the 
world has never seen before. 

2241. Imperfect Truths. — It is not 
a presumption that the truth as now 
stated is not truth, because it is wast- 
ing. Waste ! The name of God 
might be called Prodigality. Of all 
wasters there is no such waster as he, 
in nature, in human society, every- 
where. He creates to express his 
abundance. Many are called, few 
are chosen ; and the major part of the 
forces in this world go back, as it 
were, simply to constitute, by their 
decay, a soil out of which, by and by, 
better things shall grow. It is not a 
sign that the great truths of God are 
not growing in our day because there 
is such unbelief, such skepticism, such 



THEOLOGY 



477 



indifference, and such agnosticism. 
It haSsibeen so many times before. 

2242. Evolution and Theology. — 
Evolution, applied to religion, will 
influence it only as the hidden temples 
are restored, by removing the sands 
which have drifted in from the arid 
deserts of scholastic and medieval 
theologies. It will change theology, 
but only to bring out the simple tem- 
ple of God in clearer and more beau- 
tiful lines and proportions. 

2243. God's Method of Develop- 
ment. — The whole power of the evo- 
lutionary system is intensified and 
made magnificent by the supposition 
that it is a divine thought that lies be- 
hind ; that what men call "Force" 
is the impulse or the utterance that 
comes from God's nature ; that evo- 
lution is his method of unfolding it. 
It gives a more sublime conception 
of design as running through all na- 
ture, and as consummating this un- 
folding finally in the perfection of the 
race in the heavenly home. It is a 
much sublimer conception of creation 
that it should have been made to un- 
dergo this unfolding and this edu- 
cating, than to suppose that God 
whittled the world out, as it were, as 
a mechanic, and made everything off- 
hand. 

2244. Revelations Cannot be Hid- 
den. — When once a seed has unfolded 
itself, you cannot throw back the 
blossom or the fruit to the condition 
from which it came. And when 
rocks and creatures have risen up and 
testified as to God's creative method, 
you cannot put back into its germ- 
state the witness which they bear. 

2245. The Law, and the Gospel. — 
The world and the Church still vi- 
brate, with incessant pendulum, be- 
tween Sinai and Zion, between force 
and persuasion, between fear and af- 
fection, between the Law and the 



Gospel, between all that is severe and 
terrible and all that is lenient and 
comforting. But methinks that, more 
and more as the ages go on, men are 
brought into the spirit of the New 
Dispensation ; more and more the 
thunder ceases to be heard by man- 
kind ; more and more we are lifted 
above its noise. 

2245. The Theology of Love. — No 
man knows God except he knows love, 
, and that is really the spinal marrow, 
the brain and root of what is called 
" advanced theology." It is not to get 
rid of the doctrine of total depravity, 
though it may modify the statement 
of that. It is not to get rid of this 
thing and that thing. It is an attempt 
to form a philosophy that shall make 
all facts and all experiences come 
naturally crystalhzing round about 
that one central element, God is love. 
2247. Love as Judge. — I break a 
civil law ; I am brought before a 
magistrate ; and the fact is proved. 
The judge has no option, and he says, 
"The law is broken, the criminal is 
convicted, and it is my duty to affix 
the penalty." There is the fine, the 
imprisonment, the shame, and the 
public disgrace. A child violates a 
law of the household. It is now the 
mother, one that loves, before whom 
he is to be tried. The fact of viola- 
tion of duty or law is as patent in this 
case as it was in the other. The two 
cases are the same in every respect 
except in jurisdiction. The mother 
sits on a throne of love, and the civil 
magistrate on a throne of justice. 
And when you bring the wrongdoing 
into the court of love, what takes 
place? The offender says, "I am 
guilty, but I am sorry for the wrong ; 
I hate it ; and I will forsake it and 
turn away from it ; " and Love says, 
"Then I will forsake the memory of 
it, and will destroy the record of it, 



478 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



and it shall be as though you had 
never committed it." 

2248. God the Father ; God the 
Ruler. — The God whom love beholds 
rises upon the horizon like mountains 
which carry summer up their sides to 
the very top ; but that sternly just 
God whom sinners fear stands cold 
against the sky, like Mont Blanc ; and 
from his icy sides the soul, quickly 
sliding, plunges headlong down to 
destruction. 

2249. Doctrine of Total Depravity. 
— How long I went around about the 
thought of God, even in my youth ! — 
which was relatively an unsullied 
youth. The doctrine of total de- 
pravity as the result of Adam's fall, 
and the universal sinfulness of the 
race, I accepted as I did everything 
else, in the fullest faith. I was like a 
child in England, who goes around a 
magnificent garden, the wall of which 
is built of brick, ten feet high, by its 
selfish owner, so that no one can see 
the beauties within. So was the mercy 
of my God hidden ; and I went weep- 
ing around and around about the high 
wall that stood about it ; longing for 
the time to come when I might, by 
some miraculous experience, get into 
that state where he would deign to 
look upon me, and say, " Henry, 
come up." 

2250. Future Retribution.— The lov- 
ing, the gentle, the sympathetic, the 
sacrificial Saviour, who loved sinning 
men so that he came to die for them 
— he, calmly, deliberately, over and 
over again, did teach his disciples in 
such a way that they at that time, and 
since then the great body of the 
Church, have believed that he meant 
us to understand that there is a future 
state of punishment, and that it is so 
great and dreadful a thing that all 
men should with terrible earnestness 
flee from it. 



He announced the fact. He did 
not reason upon it, nor point out its 
place in a system of moral truth, nor 
give it philosophical definition, nor 
consider objections to it, nor attempt 
to reconcile it with any theory of Di- 
vine love or Divine power. He raised 
his hand to the sky to draw aside the 
curtain, and there, right before his 
hearers, rose the dark grandeur of fu- 
ture Retribution. He bore witness to 
it as a fact. He did not discourse 
upon it as a philosophy. From the 
beginning of his ministry to the end, 
he went about saying, "Repent! 
repent ! " 

I preach the love of God, and I do 
not know what the scope of that love 
is. I do not know where it would 
logically lead. But I am sure that I 
am right in preaching that all punitive 
elements are under the control of love. 
I am perfectly sure that love will bring 
everything right in the end. I there- 
fore preach without qualification, and 
almost without limitation on that side. 
But I am not to be understood, on 
that account, as not believing what 
Christ himself deliberately says in re- 
spect to the peril of sin, or in regard 
to punishment in the life which is to 
come. 

2251. Fear and Love. — It is said 
that I have cast out fear from my 
preaching, and introduced an element 
of love which lacks the ribs and the 
backbone of those great systems of 
truth by which the world has thus far 
been conquered ; that the doctrine of 
love becomes mawkish, enfeebled, 
and must run out, producing senti- 
ment in the first instance, and 
sentimentality thereafter ; and that to 
have a doctrine that will meet the 
wants of all classes of men, all sorts 
of need, you must employ the great 
substantial elements of conscience 
and righteousness and fear. 



THEOLOGY 



479 



Now, the fact is, I give up neither 
conscience nor fear. I preach them 
all the time ; but I preach them as if 
you were tnen, and not unintelligent 
animah. If you are driving a yoke 
of oxen, and you say, quietly, "Gee," 
and they gee, you do not want to ram 
them with a goad. You would a great 
deal rather that they would go to your 
word than that they should go to your 
rod. Or, if you were training an intel- 
ligent horse, and he should see by the 
motion of your head, or if you are an 
accomplished rider, by the mere sway- 
ing of your body, which way you 
want him to go, and should move that 
way, you would like it better than that 
he should be trained in any other way. 

Well now, when men are so low 
that nothing but fear in its coarsest 
form will touch them, I believe in fear. 
That is to say, anything is better than 
death ; and no matter how coarse the 
fear is, if men are so brutal that you 
must teach them as brutes, then you 
must. But to insist upon it, when a 
different state of society has been in- 
troduced, and a civilization has grown 
up, and Christianized households 
have been established, on an ascend- 
ing scale, until the whole tendency of 
men is changed — to insist that then 
we are to go on in the fear of fire and 
brimstone and hell and damnation, 
that we are to have burning coals for 
motives, and that unless we do it we 
are unfaithful to the truth — that is to 
barbarize the Gospel. It is to misun- 
derstand the fundamental philosophy 
of the truth. 

2252. Justice and Love. — In the 
kitchen are two girls. One is hired. 
She is conscientious enough, and she 
says, " I serve my mistress because 
she gives me my wages every month. 
It is right that I should give her my 
service." Who is the other girl ? 
Well, when this good, kind woman 



was one day wandering about, she 
found in the street a poor girl, half 
blind, and sick, with no one to care 
for her ; and, as no asylum could 
easily be found for her, took her to 
her own house, and put her on her 
own bed, and watched over her, and 
nursed her, and healed her. Besides, 
seeing that she was bewildered in 
ignorance, she instructed her. The 
girl has been under that woman's roof 
for five or six years, and has learned 
to love the one that never forsook her 
in her time of need. She is not on 
pay. She does not receive a cent. 
She has her clothing and food, to be 
sure, but she is not hired. And yet, 
she works harder than the other girl, 
rises earlier, sits up later, and is 
more particular to have things just 
right. What makes her so faithful ? 
It is not money. It is not justice. 
" Ah ! " she says, "if it had not been 
for that blessed woman I should have 
been in my grave, or a pauper in the 
poorhouse, to-day." These two girls 
are both serving from honorable mo- 
tives ; but which is the more powerful 
motive, justice or love? I tell you, 
love will do all that justice will, and 
ten times more ; for, while justice is 
always good for a pattern, love has a 
long fringe to it. 

2253, Obedience to Law and to 
Love. — I was afraid to do a great 
many things when my mother who 
brought me up had forbidden me to 
do them — I was afraid of the con- 
sequences; and the fear which I felt 
worked very salutarily. And yet right 
along side of her was a good old nurse 
who lived in the family, and who by 
kindness had won my heart ; and 
when she told me not to do anything 
I had come to that state of obedience, 
through love, that I would not even 
go out in the morning and pick up the 
apples that had fallen during the night, 



4So 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



before anybody else could get them. 
Father had said that I must not do it ; 
but I obeyed not for that reason, but 
simply because Aunt Chandler said, 
" Don't do it ! " 

2254. The Father-View of God. — 
Vindictive justice was once thought to 
be perfectly right ; but it cannot be 
defended in the great court of love. 
Penal suffering, discipHnary and 
educatory, can ; but not vindictive 
justice. The Fatherhood of God is 
taking the place of Oriental monarchy. 
Once it was held that God might do 
just what he pleased, because he 
pleased. Now we are taught that God 
may do what he pleases, because love 
always pleases to do the best of things. 
The question that arises is not, " What 
may a supreme monarch do with his 
subjects? " but, " What must a Father 
do with his erring children? " 

2255. Divine Law and Divine 
Mercy. — One would think, to hear 
theologians reasoning about God and 
the methods of salvation, and the 
motives of divine procedure, that the 
Deity was a fourth-proof lawyer 
judge, and that he sat surrounded by 
infinite volumes of statutes and laws, 
running back to eternity and running 
forward to eternity ; and that in every 
case of mercy he said, " Let me con- 
sider first. Does it agree with the 
statute ? " When a poor sinner comes 
to him, undone, wretched, miserable, 
he has to consult his books to see 
whether he can be saved so as not to 
injure the law, saying, " Let us ex- 
amine the law to see if it will do to 
save him." 

Oh ! away with this pedantic judge ! 
Such a judge is bad enough in the 
necessities of a weak earthly govern- 
ment, and is infinitely shameful when 
brought to the center of the universe, 
and deified. There 1 behold God, 
naming with love, filling infinite space 



with the magnitude and blessedness 
of his love ; and, if some questioning 
angel asks, " How shalt thou save, 
and yet keep the law?" He says, 
"I will have mercy on whom 1 will 
have mercy. My own will, my own 
impulse, my own desire, my own 
heart— that shall guide me." 

2256. Law not Religion. — What 
the bones are to the body, that is law 
in the system of religion. It is that 
which stiffens and strengthens ; but 
bones are poor company that have no 
meat on them, whether in society or 
religion. There is many a man whose 
religion grins like a skull on long, lank 
vertebne ; or, if it is covered by the 
skin at all, it is a ghastly skin, for it is 
dried on. This is not religion, any 
more than anatomy is a man. 

2257. Conditions of Salvation. — 
There is an old German legend, 
which represents that a noble knight 
asked in marriage the daughter of the 
king, who ironically told him that 
when he should ride in full armor on 
his steed up to the castle gate, on a 
certain side, he should wed her. 
Now on that side it was sheer prec- 
ipice. There were abysses and ra- 
vines sunk between rocks hundreds 
and hundreds of feet. And although 
there was a promise made by the king 
to the knight, the conditions necessary 
to its fulfillment were impossible to be 
complied with. The legend, how- 
ever, states that the knight was on 
such good terms with gnomes and 
fairies that they lifted up ponderous 
stones, and built a bridge ; and, sure 
enough, up he came riding over the 
rocks and across the ravines and 
abysses. For the point of the whole 
story is, that love will teach a man to 
climb any height. 

Now, although the story is well 
enough for a legend, what can be 
said of the king's promise ? What is 



THEOLOGY 



481 



a promise made to the demands of 
love, the conditions of which are 
simply impossible to be complied 
with ? And what would be a promise 
of salvation to all men, if the condi- 
tions were riding up the steep precipice 
of impossibility ; if the conditions 
were such that no mortal power could 
enable a man to comply with them ? 

2258. Knowledge Passeth Away. — 
" I am all gold," says the great 
nugget, as it comes out of the mine. 
" I will see what you are," says the 
chemist ; and he puts it into the 
crucible. A part of it proves to be 
gold, and a part of it slag. The 
lump of gold is not so big by one half 
when it comes out as it was when it 
went in ; but it is pure gold that comes 
out, and dross that is left behind. 

We are full of conceit. The de- 
velopments of the ages accumulating 
upon us, have filled us with what we 
think to be knowledge and certainties. 
Much of it will prove to be false. 
But when we come out after having 
been put into the alembic, the little 
that we shall bring with us will be 
worth more than all that we carried 
in, in its gross condition. 

2259. Perfection in Differentiation. — 
Suppose that the butt of an oak-tree 
should take it into its head to be one 
of the modern theologians, and should 
insist upon unity, and should say to 
all the branches, " Come back ! You 
have been spreading to dangerous 
latitudes and longitudes. Come and 
get back into my loins here. Be 
united in me." What would the tree 
be worth for bird or for beast, for 
painter or for man ? If you were to 
reduce it back again into that state in 
which it would be nearest to absolute 
unity, you would carry it back into 
the condition of the acorn, or into the 
condition of wood. And as you carry 
it away from its seminal point, you 



carry it where there are subdivisions, 
disclosures, these dividing again infin- 
ilesimally. And this is not simply 
an illustration : it is an absolute and 
established philosophical law, that 
perfection hes in the direction of dis- 
closure, diversity, differentiation. 

2260. Power in Diversity. — It is 
with truth as it is with trees. The 
part that stands in the ground is a 
solid unit — the trunk ; but the part 
which deals with the sun, and there- 
fore has in it the principle of life, is 
forever branching, and branching, 
and branching. And if a tree hates 
anything, it is a straight stalk. It 
wants to bend and turn here and there. 
And so it goes on sphtting and divid- 
ing. But does it injure the tree ? 
Does the fruit grow on the solid part, 
or on the twigs? The power of truth 
lies in diversity, and not in unity. In 
great basic developments, unity ; in 
the higher elements, ramification. 

2261. Different Roads to the Same 
End. — The structure of the mind for- 
bids this absolute believing alike, and 
yet we may believe in a substantial 
unity ; we may believe alike in a gen- 
eral way. 

The New Jerusalem is pictured in 
the Revelations as having twelve 
gates. Of course the idea came from 
the twelve tribes of Israel and the 
twelve patriarchs (not one of whom I 
should think got into Heaven, though, 
by the way they acted) ; but one 
thing is very certain, that if a city has 
twelve gates, the men that cannot go 
in at one gate can go in at another 
and opposite one, and they have to 
take different roads to get into them. 
Now, if a man wishes to go from New 
York to Chicago, and wishes to go by 
the way of Alabama, it is perfectly 
permissible ; it will take him longer 
and cost him more, and fatigue him 
more, but when he has come to 



482 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



Chicago he has got there, just as 
much as if he had gone in a straight 
line. So, in regard to the great things 
of rehgion, and love to God and love 
to man, if once they reach tliat, the 
road is a matter for individual judg- 
ment and convenience. 

2262. Apocalyptic Figures. — New 
England has one fundamental heresy. 
The typical New England man thinks 
that everything in God's universe can 
be reduced to an idea, and expressed 
in an intellectual form. New Eng- 
landers, therefore, are always attempt- 
ing to take the marrow out of things. 
As we take the crab, and suck the 
marrow out of each particular joint, 
so they take every figure, illustration 
and symbol in the prophecies or in 
the Revelations, and want to crush it, 
and squeeze out the marrow that is in 
it, and bring it into the form of an in- 
tellectual statement ; but that is abso- 
lutely impossible. It is absurd. 

2263. Unity and Harmony. — Throw 
away that misleading word " unity." 
Put in its place instead the word 
"harmony," and then all theology 
will become reconciled. Then we 
can go altogether, though we differ ; 
yea, the more can we rejoice, going 
together, that we differ. The infantry 
need never envy the cavalry nor the 
artillery the infantry. They are all 
composite elements of the one grand 
army. 

2264. The Mother-Creed. — Allusion 
has been made to creeds, and the 
brethren have delicately intimated 
that I have no creed. I have what I 
call the mother of creeds, and it is one 



made out for me in the New Testa- 
ment, and which I can subscribe to. 

" Thou shalt love the Lord thy God 
with all thy heart, and with all thy 
mind, and with all thy strength." 
That is the first Article, and the sec- 
ond is: "Thy neighbor as thyself." 
There is the creed that never was 
acted up to yet, except by Jesus ; and 
I have struggled for it, and therefore 
I have had to be at variance with a 
good deal of the theology that is go- 
ing. I have had a struggle, and a 
big one, with the doctrines in which I 
was brought up, and I have got them 
mostly under. They had to be con- 
verted a good deal. I was brought up 
by an orthodox New England father, 
and in a time of great controversy be- 
tween the Unitarians and the ortho- 
dox, and, sitting at my father's table, 
heard all the differences between the 
new and the old theology. I went 
through it all, as we have to go 
through chicken-pox and measles, 
but I got over it, and have enjoyed 
good health since. 

2265 . Three Fundamental Elements. 
— I think that these are the three fun- 
damental elements in the Gospel — 
universal human sinfulness, universal 
recovering love, and the universal 
immortality of men. This gives the 
horizon and the atmosphere ; this 
gives the great motive and efficient 
power ; this gives the subject on 
which the atmosphere and the power 
work. Man sinful ; immortality his 
destiny ; God, the Redeemer, work- 
ing out his salvation. It is a sublime 
drama. 



XXXIX, PREACHING 



2266. What is Preaching ? — Preach- 
ing is simply the extension of that which 
has existed from the beginning, and 
in all forms of society, all conditions 



and institutions ; it is the application 
of personal emotion and thought to 
living people. I hold that emotion 
with intellect — emotion as the bow 



PREACHING 



483 



and the intellect as the arrow — that is 
preaching ; that is the philosophy of 
it in a figure. 

2267. Narrowness of Conceit. — No 
man can be very broad who will 
build with nothing but what he quar- 
ries from himself. 

2268. Preaching Must Suit Its Era. 
— Preaching like every other function 
or instrument, must be an unfolding, 
and it must adapt itself to the cliang- 
ing conditions of society, and to the 
larger and richer conceptions of truth 
which God sends from period to period 
to mankind. The preaching that is 
now existing in the organized churches 
of the world is as far removed from 
the preaching of the apostolic day as 
the almanacs of to-day are different 
from the alr^nacs of that day. Its 
fundamentar'':^^* .and genius are that 
it is an instruti^ent^'by which a living 
man works upon living men for the 
furtherance of their Tajftral and spiritual 
condition. That does not change ; 
but the mode of carrying it out 
changes from age to age. 

2269. Simple Truths. — The small- 
est key, being put into a music-box 
rightly made and rightly tuned, may 
cause that box to go on for an hour, 
rolling out exquisite tunes. What the 
box performs is in no proportion to the 
size of the key. And the size of the 
truth that winds up a man's experi- 
ences and feelings is no proportion to 
the breadth of those feelings and ex- 
periences. That truth may be simple ; 
and yet, as a key in the hand of God 
applied to the music-box of the soul, 
it may unfold and develop that which 
shall fill a whole life. 

2270. Heart-Eloquence. — A man 
that is rude and ignorant, who cannot 
speak the English tongue within sight 
of grammar, who would not be toler- 
ated in an ordinary audience, but who 
has a great soul, and is filled with 



sympathy for his kind, will do a hun- 
dredfold more than Aristotle and Plato 
and Bacon rolled together, standing 
before a community and preaching to 
them simply with knowledge. 

2271. The Ardent Preacher.— A 
true preacher is God's mint. God 
heats his heart till the truth flows 
hke molten gold, and his utterance is 
prepared, as dies are, to stamp on the 
coin what God has cut in him. But 
thousands of preachers are only ex- 
change brokers, who run between 
bank and customer to carry old coin 
back and forth for commercial uses. 
There is need for these too, only 
lower down. 

2272. Personality in the Preacher 

It makes no difference who the man is 
that makes a mathematical calculation, 
if he is correct ; he may be as cold as 
a stone or as hot as fire, and it does 
not make the slightest difference : but 
in moral truth it makes all the dif- 
ference in the world. If a man be 
stern, acerb, litigious, and preach the 
truth of Jesus Christ, it goes down to 
zero ; but if a man is Christlike, and 
covers up a heresy with all the sweet- 
ness of a true Christian disposition, 
the heresy is better for the world than 
the truth is under the opposite manifes- 
tation. It is the personal element that 
characterizes the Christian ministry. 

2273. Cold-hearted Preachers. — 
There is great meaning in the person- 
ality of a man that preaches. It is 
that of God which is in us and is our 
actual dispositional life that has in it 
the power for preaching. A hard, 
proud man may preach the Gospel of 
love technically, but he does not really 
preach it ; and a good deal of the 
preaching to-day is like a score of 
music which a man cannot play, he 
can only call off the letters on the 
scale as if he were playing it ; but 
that is not the music. 



484 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



2274. Preachers Born, Not Made. — 
A man should be born to the pulpit. 
A musician is one whose brain nat- 
urally secretes musical ideas ; a poet 
thinks in blossoms just as naturally as 
honeysuckles do ; an inventor's head 
is made to work out mechanical com- 
binations. The men that ought to 
preach should be ordained in birth. 
The laying on of hands can't make 
an empty head full, nor a cold heart 
warm, nor a silent nature vocal. A 
true preacher is a genius in moral ideas, 
as a poet is in beautiful ideas, and 
an inventor in physical ideas, 

2275. Every Preacher a Partialist. 
— The attempt of any one man to 
represent in himself every conceivable 
form of the human mind is the very 
height of impertinence and self-con- 
ceit. No man, even if he is built 
larger than Shakespeare or Bacon, 
can be universal in knowledge, or can 
represent truth in all the endless man- 
ifestations which it takes on. Every 
man who gives forth the truth has to 
do it as every bird gives forth its 
song. The robin sings as a robin ; 
bluebirds sing as bluebirds (I heard 
them yesterday) ; the song-sparrow 
sings as a song-sparrow ; and that is 
all they can do. If a sparrow should 
undertake to imitate thunder, or 
mimic an eagle, how absurd it would 
be ! yet it would not be more 
preposterous and absurd than that 
which many preachers try to do, 
and which many persons of sup- 
posed wisdom and prudence encour- 
age them to do. 

2276. The Individual Message. — 
God sent into the world every man 
who is a witness for the truth to be a 
witness in some respects as no other 
person is or can be. A minister is 
afraid to preach poor sermons, but I 
hold that a man who does not preach 
poor sermons will never be a good 



preacher. There would never be any 
mountains unless there were valleys 
between. That is an illustration only, 
but this is certain — that a man must 
himself be so commanded by the truth 
that he shall not be afraid to let him- 
self out, 

2277. Native Ordination. — A 
clergyman is a man ; he is a citizen ; 
he is a teacher of moral things, with- 
out any privilege to teach more than 
anybody else. Anybody may teach 
that can and wants to. And if he 
tries and succeeds, that is call enough. 
That is the best evidence that he is 
ordained to teach. Four hundred 
thousand angels blowing trumpets for 
a fool would not give him a right to 
preach ; and without a trumpet, with- 
out a call, a man that has it in him, 
and loves men, and understands what 
is for their welfare, and is willing to 
tell them of it, has a right to preach. 
The whole matter is as simple as com- 
mon-sense itself. 

2278. Apostolic Succession. — There 
has been a great dispute as to 
whether there are any legitimate 
descendants of the Apostles. I think 
there are. They are supposed to 
come by the imposition of hands. / 
believe they come by the imposition 
of hands. It is supposed that the 
hand is placed on the head of the 
candidate. No, it is placed a little 
lower down — upon the heart. And it 
is the hand of the Holy Ghost. He 
is a lineal descendant of the Apostles 
who has a clearer and higher under- 
standing of the truth than those about 
him, and who so preaches it that it 
disturbs the consciences, the peace 
and the settled order, of those about 
him, and disturbs them just so far as 
is necessary to the work of reforma- 
tion. 

2279. Adaptation to the Times. — 
It is said, "Are we wiser than the 



PREACHING 



485 



Apostles were?" I hope so. I 
should be ashamed if we were not. 
"Are we better preachers than they 
were ? ' ' Yes, we ought to be better 
preachers in our time than they 
would be. They were adapted to 
their times, admirably ; but I think it 
is as much a misapplication of things 
to bring down literally the arguments 
of the Apostles from Jerusalem to our 
times, as it would have been, were it 
possible, to carry back all the scientific 
knowledge, and all the developed 
political economy which we now have, 
and preach them in old Jerusalem, 
within the Temple. We should be 
barbarians to them, and they would 
be comparative barbarians to us. 
Adaptation to the times in which we 
live, is the law of Providence. The 
Apostles were adapted to their times. 
We must be similarly adapted, 

2280. Pulpit and Pew. — It is not 
the trumpeters that fight the battles — 
though you would think so to hear 
them ! And it will not be the men 
that make the loudest proclamations, 
or that utter them with the most 
eloquent lips, that shall stand highest 
in the world that is to come. 

I do not expect to stand half so high 
as many an unheard name will, to 
whom my words bring some comfort. 
There is many a timid eye that looks 
up and wishes she were as good as I 
am. Dear mother-heart and soul ! 
you are a thousand times better. 
And in the other land I shall not be 
worthy to unloose your shoe's latchet. 

2281. The Ministerial Instinct. — 
Artists love form, and color; minis- 
ters love men. The mechanic loves 
inventions and machines, and looks 
with a curious eye upon whatever is 
ingenious and fruitful of results ; the 
minister loves men. The drunkard 
loves his cup— that is his inspiration ; 
the minister loves men. The glutton 



loves his food ; the minister loves 
men. The angler loves to catch fish 
from the running brook; the minister 
loves to fish for men. It is, then, this 
longing for men that makes the minis- 
ter, just as the love of children makes 
the mother. 

2282. Knowledge of Human Nature. 
— A man may know the Bible from 
Genesis to Revelation, he may know 
every theological treatise from the day 
of Augustine to the day of Ur. Taylor, 
and if he does not understand human 
nature, he is not fit to preach. 

Suppose a man should undertake to 
cut off your leg because he had been 
an instrument-maker. He had made 
lancets, probes, saws, and that sort of 
thing, all his life ; but he had never 
seen a man's leg amputated, and did 
not know exactly where the arteries or 
veins lie. Suppose he should think 
that making surgeons' tools fitted him 
to be a surgeon ; would it ? The 
surgeon must know his tools and how 
to handle them, but he must know, 
too, the system on which he is going 
to use them. And shall a man, 
charged with the care of the soul, 
sharpen up his understanding with 
moral distinctions and learned argu- 
ments, and know all about the theories 
of theology from Adam down to our 
day, and yet know nothing of the 
organism upon which all these in- 
strumentalities are to be used? Shall 
he know nothing about man himself ? 

2283. The Study of Men. — The 
lawyer must study human nature, in 
order to get at the facts of his case ; 
the merchant, for the sake of his own 
profits ; the politician, for the sake of 
carrying out certain political ends ; but 
these do not imply that men are to be 
made better or worse. A minister 
studies human nature for the purpose 
of Tet^enerating men. We study men 
as florists do flowers, when they wish 



486 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



to change them from simple blossoms 
into rare beauties. It is to make more 
out of human nature than we origi- 
nally fmd in it, that we are studying 
it and training it. 

2284. The Preacher, All Things to 
All Men. — A man overhears a woman 
— a famed poet and literary woman — 
teaching an infant-class. He has 
heard that she is a wonderful genius, 
and he stands and listens as she talks 
to half a dozen small children. She 
makes not one classical allusion, she 
utters no great truth, she does nothing 
but address the simplest language to 
them. He goes away and says : "I 
heard her teach that class for an hour, 
and she gave them no history, no 
poetry, nothing but the merest child's 
talk." But she made herself a child 
for the time being, in order that she 
might instruct those children. 

2285. Like Priest, Like People. — 
When our evening meetings have 
fallen off, I have always said to my- 
self, " You are falling off, and not the 
people." Even when I have not 
remedied the evil, I have known the 
cause of it all the time. And, on the 
other hand, the moment my own soul 
was full, and my sympathies flowed 
out in overwhelming tides towards my 
fellow-men, I have noticed that my 
meetings have gone up. If a man 
sleeps under my preaching, I do not 
send a boy to wake him up ; but I feel 
that a boy had better come and wake 
me up. 

2286. Great Sermons. — "Great 
sermons," ninety-nine times in a 
hundred are nuisances. They are 
like steeples without any bells in 
them ; things stuck up high in the 
air, serving for ornament, attracting 
observation, but sheltering nobody, 
warming nobody, helping nobody. 

2287. Power of the True Preacher, 
— As the live sparks from the hunter's 



pipe, thrown carelessly into the ripe 
grass of the prairie, will kindle a 
flame that sweeps over leagues 
and leagues, so one single glowing 
coal of a man has burned over a 
superstitious age and changed the 
whole aspect of humanity. And if 
there be multiplied men, ordained of 
God and not of their fellow-men, in- 
spired by divine zeal to work for the 
welfare of their fellow-men, — men 
who have that as their ambition, as 
their occupation, as their pride, as 
their joy, as their light and reward 
forever, and whose motto is, " Not 
yours, but you" ; is there any con- 
ception of vocation that is grander 
than that ? 

2288. Oratory. — There are two 
great elements in organ-playing. One 
is to render music that has been writ- 
ten by others ; the other is to originate 
music one's self. A man who has 
command of an organ, and can ex- 
press his own thoughts with fluency, 
power and ability, stands in the first 
rank, and far above the man who 
merely renders the musical composi- 
tions of others. 

Organ-playing has a correspondence 
to oratory. There are readers and there 
are extemporaneous speakers. I hold 
that a man who can speak out of his 
own thought and feeling, and speak, 
too, without the bondage and impris- 
onment of written notes — who can 
gush forth things which men love to 
hear and need to hear — stands higher 
than the man who reads what he him- 
self thinks or has thought ; and he 
stands a world higher than the man 
who reads another man's oration or 
sermon. Reading other men's dis- 
courses is very good. A man might 
read Dr. Chalmers' sermons, or the 
discourses of any of the great sermon- 
izers of the world, with large profit. I 
think feeble preachers are oftentimes 



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at fault because they do not read 
others' sermons — only they should tell 
their hearers what they are doing. 

2289. The Talker. — This is preemi- 
nently the talking age. A preacher 
must be a good talker, and must have 
something in him that is worth talking 
about. People say, " Show me a 
man of deeds, and not of words." 
You might as well say, " Show me a 
field of corn ; I don't care about 
clouds and rain." Talking makes 
thought and feeling, and thought and 
feeling make action. Show me a man 
of words who knows how to incite 
noble deeds ! 

2290. Greatness of the True Orator. 
— He is a great man who can play 
upon the human soul ! We think him 
a great artist, ,who can play on an 
organ with sixty stops, combining 
them infinitely, and drawing out har- 
mony and melody, marching them 
through with grand thought, to the 
end of the symphony ; that indicates 
a master, we think. It does ; but 
what organ that man ever built does 
not shrink in comparison with the one 
that God built and called Man ? 
Where you have before you a whole 
congregation or a whole community, 
and all their wants and needs are 
known, and you are trying to draw 
out of them a higher and nobler life, 
what an instrument you have to play 
upon, and what a power it is when 
you have learned it, and have the 
touch by which you can play so as to 
control its entire range and compass ! 

2291. Preaching to Please. — There 
is a great deal of moral drunkenness 
produced by stimulating preaching 
which does not inspire a man to think 
anything or do anything, but which 
burns and burns, and makes him 
happier and happier, but not better, 
A man that is happier and not better 
is worse. 



2292. Brilliant Ministers. — Accord- 
ing to the popular notion the business 
of a minister is to throw rockets into 
tile air, taking care that the sticks do 
not come down on men's heads. And 
you shall often see a minister throw 
up a rocket, of which men exclaim, 
"Splendid sermon! magnificent dis- 
course! " as it splits into five or six 
applications, one green, another red, 
and the rest of other bright colors. 
He does not hit anything. He aimed 
at the stars. One shot goes back to 
the flood, another goes forward to the 
millennium, another goes to Asia, 
another goes to Africa, another to the 
rising of the sun, and another to the 
setting thereof. 

2293. Unthinking Ministers. — There 
are a great many slumbering ministers 
who do not have any trouble ; but 
their people are full of trouble. There 
come to laymen questions which they 
cannot solve, and they are like per- 
sons groping in dark passages. For 
the most part they go with their 
mouths shut. If now and then one 
ventures to come to his minister he is 
told, "You are straying into by and 
forbidden paths. Let such matters 
alone and attend to your duties." 
That is all very well, provided one can 
do it. If a man has no wings he can 
keep upon his feet ; but if a man has 
wings he will fly. You cannot make 
an eagle run round and round a barn- 
yard like a hen. 

2294. The Orator's Voice. — The 
best of all properties in a speaking- 
hall is a man that knows how to 
speak, and has something to speak 
with ! What does a rooster care for 
acoustic aids? He mounts a fence 
lustily, gives a preliminary flap of his 
wings, as if to say, " I could have 
flown twice as high," and then lets off 
a crow that rings and echoes for a 
mile around. A bull will sound you a 



488 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



bass note that would make old West- 
minster Abbey shake. A crow will 
caw to you at two miles distance with- 
out the fear of bronchitis. A dog will 
bark to a whole town without the 
slightest inconvenience — to himself. 
And yet men who are brought up to 
speaking as the business of their lives 
cannot make themselves heard at a 
hundred feet distance, or, only by ex- 
ertions that send them home for 
liniments, bandages, and caustic ! 

2295. Vocal Power to be Trained 
for. — The newsboys stand at the head 
of a street and send their voice down 
through it as an athlete would roll a 
ball down an alley. We advise men 
training for speaking professions to 
peddle wares in the streets for a little 
time. Young ministers might go into 
partnership with newsboys a while, till 
they got their mouths open, and their 
larynx nerved and toughened. 

2296. Pulpit and Platform. — This 
period in which we are living is a 
period of great doubt. [Mr. Beecher, 
who was speaking in an English 
church, from a platform under the 
pulpit, began in a low tone of voice, 
and at the end of the first sentence 
there were cries of "Pulpit!" and 
"Can't hear!" from the congrega- 
tion.] If you will make less noise 
you will hear me before I get through. 
As to the pulpit, I think about it as 
Daniel Webster did ; he regarded the 
continuance of religion in this world, 
in spite of pulpits, to be one of the 
signs of its divinity. I suppose pul- 
pits were originally framed after the 
apocalyptic vision of a candlestick, 
and ministers have been too much like 
wax candles in candlesticks, hard and 
stiff, with very little light. No man 
would ever undertake to plead for the 
life of a fellow-man from a pulpit. No 
man would ever undertake to go before 
a crowd for votes, and be perched up 



on the top end of a candlestick. 
When a man is in earnest in preach- 
ing he ought to preach from the top of 
his head to his toe. It is not the voice 
alone ; it is the man informed with his 
subject that preaches. The platform 
is the place for the preacher. 

2297. Platform, Not Pulpit. — When 
a man is made by God he is made 
all over, and every part is necessary 
to each and to the whole, A man's 
whole form is a part of his public 
speaking. His feet speak and so do 
his hands. You put a man in one of 
these barreled pulpits, where there is 
no responsibility laid upon him as to 
his body, and he falls into all manner 
of gawky attitudes, and rests himself 
like a country horse at ahitching-post. 
He sags down, and has no conscious- 
ness of his awkwardness. But bring 
him out on a platform, and see how 
much more manly he becomes, how 
much more force comes out ! The 
moment a man is brought face to face 
with other men, then does the influence 
of each act and react upon the other. 

2298. Artificial Style in Speaking. — 
Involved sentences, crooked, circui- 
tous, and parenthetical, no matter how 
musically they may be balanced, are 
prejudicial to a facile understanding 
of the truth. Never be grandilo- 
quent when you want to drive home a 
searching truth. Don't whip with a 
switch that has the leaves on, if you 
want to tingle. 

2299. Simplicity of Language. — He 
who uses mainly the Anglo-Saxon vo- 
cabulary, giving preference to the 
idioms and phrases which are homely, 
will have a power which cannot be 
derived from any other use of human 
language. Such language is an echo 
in the experience of men ; and as a 
phrase in a mountainous country, 
when roundly uttered, goes on repeat- 
ing itself from peak to peak, running 



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in alternate reverberations through 
the whole valley, so a truth runs 
through all the ranges of memory in 
the mind of the hearer, not the less 
real because so extremely rapid and 
subtle as to defy analysis. The words 
themselves, full of secret suggestions 
and echoes, multiply the meaning in 
the minds of men, and make it even 
more in the recipient than it was in 
the speaker. Words are to the thought 
what musical notes are to melodious 
ideas. As an instance of contrasted 
style, let one read the immortal alle- 
gory of John Bunyan in contrast with 
the grandiose essays of Dr. Johnson. 
Bunyan is to-day like a tree planted 
by the rivers of water, that bringeth 
forth his fruit in season ; his leaf shall 
not wither. Johnson, with all his 
glory, lies like an Egyptian king, 
buried and forgotten in the pyramid 
of his fame. 

2300. Christ's Methods of Illustra- 
tion. — It was peculiar to Christ's 
teaching that he developed the high- 
est truths from the commonest events. 
His mind perceived the unity of crea- 
tion. He instantly traced the filament 
by which the smallest thing runs up and 
joins the very center. As by nerves 
every pore and every particle of skin 
is connected with the great sentient 
cerebral center in the human body, so 
every single event that takes place in 
connection with man has its termina- 
tion in the Eternal. Therefore it was 
Christ's way to mount from the most 
inconspicuous and unimportant events 
and happenings to the very highest 
range of being, and to truths relating 
to man in his highest range. 

2301. Rhetorical Illustrations. — An 
illustration is never to be a mere orna- 
ment, although its being ornamental 
is no objection to it. If a man's ser- 
mon is like a boiled ham, and the il- 
lustrations are like cloves stuck in it 



afterwards to make it look a little 
better, or like a bit of celery or other 
garnish laid around on the edge for 
the mere delectation of the eye, it is 
contemptible. But if you have a real 
and good use for an illustration, that 
has a real and direct relation to the 
end you are seeking, then it may be 
ornamental, and no fault should be 
found with it for that. 

2302. How to Use Illustrations. — 
With illustrations, there should be 
energy and vigor in their delivery. 
Let them come with a crack, as when 
a driver would stir up his team. The 
horse does not know anything about 
it until the crack of the whip comes. 
So with an illustration. Make it 
sharp. Throw it out. Let it come 
better and better, and the best at the 
last, and then be done with it. 

2303. Mirthful Illustrations. — Never 
turn aside from a laugh any more 
than you would from a cry. Go 
ahead on your Master's business, and 
do it well. And remember this, that 
every faculty in you was placed there 
by the dear Lord God for his service. 
Never try to raise a laugh for a laugh's 
sake, or to make men merry as a piece 
of sensationalism, when you are 
preaching on solemn things. That is 
allowable at a picnic, but not in a 
pulpit where you are preaching to 
men in regard to God and their own 
destiny. But if mirth comes up natu- 
rally, do not stifle it ; strike that chord, 
and particularly if you want to make 
an audience cry. If I can make them 
laugh, I do not thank anybody for the 
next move ; I will make them cry. 
Did you ever see a woman carrying a 
pan of milk quite full, and it slops 
over on one side, that it did not im- 
mediately slop over on the other also? 

2304. Preaching : Dullness and Lev- 
ity. — Whoever hides the truth by em- 
bellishment of words, by a vain exhi- 



490 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



bition of wit or fancy, by opaque 
learning, by the impenetrable thickets 
of nice distinctions, by stupidity and 
lifelessness, by inane solemnity, and 
sanctimonious conventionalism, is a 
desecrator of the pulpit and a breaker 
of the Sabbath day. Stupidity hides 
the truth just as fatally as levity. 
Consecrated dullness is no better than 
flippant folly. If a window fails to 
let the light through, it makes little 
difference whether the obscuration 
comes from the web of a big, lazy, 
spider, or from the nimble weavings 
of a hundred pert little spiders. 

2305. Concrete Truth Better than 
Abstract Doctrine. — You will observe 
that while Dr. Finney, and men of the 
old-fashioned school who were so suc- 
cessful, brought in rigor of logic to 
develop before their congregations the 
whole moral scheme of God's govern- 
ment with tremendous effect, Mr. 
Moody does not go through with that 
reasoning. He does not deal with 
doctrine. He does what is a great 
deal better, so far as concerns the 
audiences to which he is called to 
minister— he deals with truth. He 
gives them bread ; and that is a great 
deal more to the purpose when they 
are hungry than giving them wheat in 
the kernel would be. 

2306. Dangers of Being Praised. — 
We all love praise, but praise should 
follow us and never precede us. If 
you have done right and men like it, 
then it comes under the category of 
things that are of "good report," 
which we are commanded to ponder 
and to think upon. But remember 
you [young ministers] are going into 
the midst of fire with inflammable gar- 
ments on you, and there is nothing 
that weakens a man so quickly and is 
so dangerous to him as measuring 
everything by its relation to his popu- 
larity and to his success in life. And 



then he has his own church to try to 
spoil him. Of course, God raises up 
deacons by whom men are held in 
sometimes. Oftentimes, in this world 
a thorn in the flesh is one ray for a 
man's crown by and by ; but where 
there is one deacon that is a vexatious 
intruder on your individual liberty, 
there are a hundred old women or 
young women that are praising you 
and flattering you, saying kind things 
to you, and seeking to soften you. I 
believe in softness in the heart ; but I 
do not believe in having a man's head 
soft. That is one of the things you 
must watch against. 

2307. Place-Hunting, for Ministers. 
— Have you never seen, at sunset, a 
hen walking around a tree irresolute 
as to the bough which she would take, 
stooping for one, and then quitting 
that and stooping for another, and 
then quitting that and stooping for 
another? Just like such a hen are 
some ministers that I have seen run- 
ning about for a settlement, stooping 
for one, and then, thinking that it was 
not quite good enough, quitting it and 
stooping for another, thus frittering 
away their time and energies to no 
purpose. Let such men turn away at 
once from the camp of God, and go 
to the camp of the world. There they 
belong. 

2308, Preaching and Practice. — 
Men say, whenever they give way to 
violent passions, though they be 
Christians : " It's all very well for 
you to stand in the pulpit, and teach 
us such things as this, but if you were 
in my place, you would have done 
just such things as I have done." I 
think very likely, my beloved, for I 
am as big a fool as you are, in many 
things, strange as it may seem to you. 
But because two men sin, and one the 
teacher, it does not follow that the 
teacher was not right in his doctrine. 



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2309. An Obstacle for Ministers. — 
A man at the bank hands you the 
money for your check. It is ten thou- 
sand dollars, and it is going to save 
you from bankruptcy. But you do 
not account him a benefactor. You 
express not a word of gratitude to 
him. He is the teller ; you hand him 
the check, and he pays you the 
money ; he does not care for you, and 
you do not care for him. It is his 
business to hand you the money, and 
he does it, and that is all there is of 
it. And so men seem to think of a 
minister, salaried and appointed to 
stand in the pulpit and dispense the 
Gospel, that he does it professionally 
and as a matter of course. 

2310. The Range of the Preacher. — 
Like the artist at the great organ, the 
preacher should introduce in his teach- 
ing something of everything that be- 
longs to mankind ; its sacred rage and 
passion, its abhorrence of things evil, 
its genius, all imagination, all the ra- 
diance and sparkle of its wit, all the 
tenderness of its love — all that belongs 
to the sub-bass, also all that belongs 
to the highest stops, that seek to rival 
tlie very bird -notes. That is the great- 
est preacher. Ministers are afraid. 
They are afraid to be true ; they are 
afraid to be natural. They are afraid 
to bring something of everything that 
belongs to human nature into their 
pulpits, because their critics sit before 
tliem. Men say of them : " O, you 
shall never hear anything that violates 
taste. He never makes a mistake." 

The man that never makes a mis- 
take is not fit to preach. The man 
that never makes a mistake is a man 
that lives in mediocrity. You may 
furnish and decorate it as much as 
you please, it is not possible for a man 
to be in earnest, even in agriculture, 
mechanics or engineering, and make 
no mistakes. 



231 1. Attractive Presentation of 
Truth. — I should like to see fastid- 
ious, hidden, sensitive fish caught by 
thrashing the pool with your rod or 
fishing line. Ministers are to be fish- 
ers of men ; and as men study the 
nature of fish — the pout, the eel nest- 
ling in the mud, the fierce pickerel, 
the shining trout, the gamy black 
bass, the salmon or the deep-sea fish 
— and adapt their mode of fishing to 
the nature of the fish desired to be 
caught, so men are to study the mode 
of influence of one soul upon another, 
in such a way as to make the truth 
which they would lay before men, and 
into the practice of which they would 
draw them, efficacious and success- 
ful. ... A man's truth is like bait 
on a hook ; it must be such a bait as 
fish will take, and it must be on such 
a hook as will attract the fish. 

2312. Fishers of Men. — The more 
you look at this figure the more im- 
portant it becomes. To fish well, it 
is necessary to study the peculiarities 
of fish. It is necessary to know more 
than the science of ichthyology. 
What a book can tell a man about 
fishes is worth knowing, but it is little 
that a book can do towards making a 
man a true fisherman. If a man is 
going to fish {ox fish, he must become 
their scholar before he becomes their 
master ; he must go to school to the 
brook to learn its ways. And to fish 
for men, one must learn their nature, 
their prejudices, their tendencies, and 
their courses ; he must not only know 
their habits, but their tastes and their 
resorts ; he must humor them accord- 
ing to their different natures, and 
adapt his instruments to their pecul- 
iarities, providing a spear for some, a 
hook for others, a net for others, and 
baits for each one as each one will. 
To sit on a bank or deck, and say to 
the fishes, " Here I am, authorized to 



492 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



command you to come to me and to 
bite what I give you," is ridiculous, 
even though it does resemble some 
ways of preaching. 

You must go to the fish. They cer- 
tainly will not come to you. You 
must note times and seasons. You 
must creep sometimes, lie down some- 
times, sometimes hide, sit patiently in 
the leafy covert at other times, and 
work frequently without filling your 
basket, and await a better time. You 
must study the sky, and for their food 
you must search all manner of insects, 
and everything that relates to the 
work in which you are engaged. 
The one act of catching fish must de- 
termine your whole manner. 

Luke adds to the force of this figure 
very much, Matthew says, " Ye shall 
be fishers of men;" but Luke says, 
" Ye shall catch jnen." It is very well 
to be a fisher, but it is a great deal 
better to catch what you fish for. 

2313. Theologizing and Preaching. 
— To make fishing-tackle is one thing, 
and to catch fish is another. There 
are hundreds of men who, when they 
go into the pulpit, make rods, and 
fines (very long lines), and hooks, and 
reels, and baskets. They take this or 
that doctrine, and pound it out into a 
hook, bending and kinking it just so, 
and stick it up on a paper, and label 
it, and that is the end of it. And this 
is called preaching ! But Christ says 
that that is preaching which catches 
men. 

2314. Dry Preaching. — In my own 
profession, the church has been 
starved because ministers have been 
under the idea that the dignity of the 
pulpit was so great, and the sanctity 
of the office of preaching was such, 
that a man must use only the most 
sacred parts of his nature ; and reason 
has been supposed to be that. " Not 
too much feeling, not too much ; re- 



strain your feeling, but lay a sohd 
foundation of thought. Fasten it 
together as links of iron are wrought 
into a chain connectedly, and carry it 
to its legitimate conclusion, and then 
if men are not held by it, it is their 
fault, not yours." 

And so — to change the figure — they 
shut down the windows that let in the 
light. They are of a discursive im- 
agination ; but they don't think it 
proper to bring in dainty figures, or to 
have pictures in their sermons ; that is 
wandering into by-paths. They starve 
themselves till they have scarcely the 
substance of a mosquito, and then 
think they are " sacred." 

2315. The Best Ministers. — Who is 
the best fisherman ? The man that car- 
ries the largest basket, and the best 
rod and line and hook ? No ; but the 
man who brings home the best basket- 
ful of fish. Who is the best minister ? 
Not the man who makes the hour 
most charming to you, or excites you 
with the most intellectual enjoyment ; 
but the man who, grappling with 
human nature, from week to week 
makes you more and more discon- 
tented with your lower self, and brings 
you into such communion with God 
that you are more and more fascinated 
with your higher and better life. 

2316. Variety in Preaching. — Does 
the sun shine on the sunflower and 
despise the daisy ? Does the sun 
shine on the orchard and despise the 
moss that gathers on the rock ? There 
is no great and there is no small be- 
fore the coming of the sun. To the 
sun all things are small and all things 
are great, and they all alike receive 
beneficent power from it. So, in the 
preaching of the Gospel it is the busi- 
ness of every preacher to preach to 
every man and to all men. 

2317. Subjects for Preaching. — To 
ask a preacher how he finds subjects 



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493 



for his sermons is like asking the pro- 
fessor of botany how he finds his 
botanical specimens. He goes forth, 
and finds some in marshes, some in 
the woods, some in meadows, and 
some in the mountains, and finds 
them not on any rule or prescription. 
They are to be found everywhere. 
Subjects for discourses are suggested 
by the reading of newspapers ; they 
occur in conversations with men ; or 
they glance from the experiences of 
people. There are two generic forms 
of selection in this matter. One is 
where you want to round out a truth 
before your audience, and let it help 
whomever it will ; the other is where 
you want to meet the definite case of 
a particular person, and where the 
truth is to be, like a suit of clothes, 
adapted to that person, or, like medi- 
cine or food, suited to specific wants. 

2318. Finding the Sermon-Sub- 
ject. — You look for your subject. You 
know what you are after the whole 
time. It is exactly like the watch- 
maker, who has opened your watch 
and discovered that something is 
wrong. He turns to his bench and 
pokes around among his tools, but 
cannot find what he wants ; he looks 
everywhere for it, and at last, there it 
is, and he takes it and uses it, for it is 
the only instrument exactly fitted to do 
just the thing he wanted to do in that 
watch. Now, in preaching to a con- 
gregation there are living men to 
reach ; and there is a particular way 
of doing it that you want to get at. 
You search for it in the Bible ; and 
you make your sermon to answer the 
end. This is psychological preach- 
ing, drawing from your own gradually 
augmenting intelligence and expe- 
rience, which will make you skillful in 
the ends you want to effect. 

2319. Spiritual Prescription, — It 
seems to me that the highest concep- 



tion of a sermon is, that it is a pre- 
scription which a man has made, 
either for a certain individual, or for a 
certain class, or for a certain state of 
things that he knows to exist in the 
congregation. It is as much a matter 
of prescription as the physician's 
medicine is. For instance, you say, 
" In my congregation there has been 
a good deal of affliction, which I think 
I ought to comfort. Now, of all ways 
of comforting, how shall I do it? 
Shall I show the hand of God in all 
his administration ? What will that do ? 
That mode of consolation will raise 
people up into the conception of God ; 
but those that cannot rise so high will 
fall short of it and not get it. Or, I 
can show them how afflictions will 
elevate the soul ; and that will have 
another range. Or, it may be that I 
will not say a word about that, but 
strike a blow that exhilarates men and 
lifts them up, independent of any al- 
lusion to troubles ; I may strike a chord 
to awaken the courage of men. 
What subject can I take which will 
most successfully sound that chord ? " 

2320, Tender Places in Hard Na- 
tures. — You know how it is with lame- 
ness. Sometimes there will be what 
we call a " stitch." There will be a 
sore muscle that lies buried in the 
side. If you carry yourself in a cer- 
tain way, you do not feel it ; but if you 
happen to turn a little, you get a 
wrench. When you have such a sore 
muscle about you, wherever you walk 
you have a consciousness of it, and 
you carry yourself so as to keep it 
from being twisted and hurt. 

Now, even wicked men, given up 
to revelries, have a sore place about 
them. There is a tender spot that the 
mother left. There is a sore spot that 
their own experience has caused — a 
sore conscience. And every once in 
a while, when they are inadvertently 



494 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



carrying on their wicked ways, they 
give it a twist, and it sends a pang 
through them. And in company, or 
alone, wherever they go, and what- 
ever they do, they are conscious that 
there is this sore place, as it were, 
in their moral nature. The skillful 
preacher can reach these, sometimes. 

2321. Differences of Approach to 
Men. — I have known districts in the 
West, along the banks of the Missis- 
sippi, where pickpockets, thieves, 
horse thieves, riotous men, men of 
blood and violence, having fled across 
the border, had taken refuge, and 
where populations of such men had 
grown up in vice and crime. Now, 
if I were to go into a community like 
that, and preach the Gospel, do you 
suppose I would talk to those low, 
degraded men as I do to you, who are 
shaved and washed, and who have 
been tenderly cared for, and are sus- 
ceptible to the higher truths ? No ; I 
would address their fears. I would 
hold up before them the terrors of the 
law. I would attack them where 
they were accessible. The highest 
feehngs are the best to work on ; but 
if you cannot reach those, the inter- 
mediate ones must be assailed. As in 
a great conflagration, if you cannot 
get into the burning building at one 
place, you must force your way in 
somewhere else ; so in dealing with 
men in religious matters, if you can- 
not produce an impression on one side 
of their nature, you must approach 
them on another. 

2322. Preaching: God's Desire to 
Save All, — Whatever else you do, 
don't slam the door of possibility in 
any man's face. Don't hold up any 
of the truths of the Gospel in such a 
way that the man who looks at them 
shall say it is not possible to be saved. 
The teaching of Christ and the Apos- 
tles was that God wanted all men to 



be saved, and made overtures to 
them ; that there is a possibility of 
every man's being regenerated by the 
power of the Holy Ghost. Build up 
such a spiritual superstructure that 
every little child shall feel it to be 
easier to live a Christian life than an 
ungodly life. 

2323. Failures in Sermons. — The 
Apostle never said a truer or more in- 
spired word than when he spoke of 
the foolishness of preaching. It is all 
empirical. How many times have I 
set up a sermon for a particular man, 
and let off all its batteries at him, and 
never hit him ; while a man that I 
knew nothing about was struck, and 
dashed all to pieces ! That is skill, is 
it — not to hit what you meant to, and 
to hit what you did not mean to ? As 
compared with nothing, preaching is 
glorious ; as compared with no fruit, 
its fruit is great ; but I take it that the 
day is coming when God will give 
men such sense of the nature of man 
and truth that heart shall speak to 
heart, as now hp speaks to ear. 

2324. Exclusive Preaching. — As if 
in an hospital there were a set of con- 
valescents, that now, having come to 
eggs and jelly and wine, rejoice in 
it, and flatter the surgeon and the 
physician, until he begins to say in 
himself: "These folks don't want 
medicine ; they hate that ; I guess I 
will give the patients extras, wine and 
jelly, all over the hospital, no matter 
what ails them ! " So there are minis- 
ters that have been beguiled by the 
relish and taste of a single section in 
their church to pour out eternally food 
for those that they think stand highest, 
and starvation for those that are low 
down. They are corrupted. 

2325. Imaginative Truth-Seekers. — 
There are a great many persons who 
are keenly sensitive on the side of 
imagination, and they never really 



PREACHING 



495 



receive anything as true until the fact 
or principle is, as it were, enveloped 
in a little haze. They need the mystic 
element. They do not want sharp 
outlines. There is something in mys- 
tery which is attractive to them. And 
yet some preachers insist that truth 
should be set before all men in its 
most accurate and exact form. You 
might just as well attempt to reduce 
the clouds to triangles and circles, in 
order to mathematically demonstrate 
their beauty to the eye of an artist. 

2326. Imagination Stronger than 
Reason. — Do you know that the im- 
agination is a stronger element than 
the reason ? You might suspect it by 
the fact that the Bible employs imagi- 
nation ten times where it does philoso- 
phy once. 

When old people go back to their 
childhood, what things do they re- 
member most ? Arguments ? Not at 
all. What do you remember about 
your mother that is gone ? Not any- 
thing by which she was formally made 
known to the world, but some picture, 
some scene of tenderness, some fra- 
grant sentiment which lingers in your 
imagination. What is it of your 
friends that you remember longest ? 
Not the shape of their eyebrows, or 
of their face, which was drawn as 
they sat like a wooden dunce having 
their portrait made, but that expression 
which they had when they came to 
the door and looked in and glanced 
at you ; or which flashed over their 
face when at table some story was 
told. You remember that. You 
never will forget it. The memory of 
man is kept alive by dreams, by 
superstitions, or by pictures which ap- 
peal to the imagination and the fancy. 
These things get a hold upon you 
which can never be lost. 

2327. " The Life, Indeed." — It does 
not follow that our intellect will be the 



same in the other life that it is here. 
W^c know that much that we learn is 
higher than what we learn by the per- 
ception of material and physical qual- 
ities, and through the reasoning intel- 
lect. We know perfectly well that 
what we call the intuition, or the im- 
agination, takes in things which it is 
impossible for the intellect to compre- 
hend. The intellect, as we have it 
here, is adapted simply to the condi- 
tions of this lower state ; but when we 
rise into the other life we may have a 
different intellect. There, instead of 
reducing music, or higher truths of any 
kind, to the form of statement by our 
earthly intellect, we shall, I think, 
have an intellect which will reject 
such mechanical or formal proposi- 
tions, and intuitively apprehend all 
manner of glorious qualities and truths. 
Thus we shall think by feeling, and 
not feel by thinking. 

I am distinctly conscious, in preach- 
ing, when my health is perfectly good, 
and my subject is congenial to me and 
adapted to my nature, of rising into 
states in which I have an outlook and 
insight into a realm before which 
words are as powerless as hands are 
to grasp the landscape on the other 
side of the mountain. The truth, 
under such circumstances, is more 
clear to my inward vision than is any- 
thing that I see or hear or feel to my 
outward senses. I apprehend things 
that are absolutely non-expressible by 
any human words. I experience what 
may be likened to the opening of a 
window into heaven ; and it gives me 
a feeble conception of what the future 
may be. 

2328. The Lesson Must Suit the 
Scholar. — I could read the Ten Com- 
mandments to my mule when he did 
not do his work well ; but I do not 
know that that would quicken him at 
all. I could describe to my mule the 



49^ 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



beauty of fidelity to his master, but I 
think he would trudge on about the 
same with his long ears. I address 
him further, and say, " O mule, in the 
equities of hfe, in the grand scheme 
of equivalence it is not fair that you 
should receive and not also give ; " I 
may give him a Httle political econ- 
omy ; but it does not make any differ- 
ence. I try his feelings, and say, " O 
sweet and beautiful mule ! O precious 
mule ! " in the hope that thus I may 
induce him to perform his duty ; but 
he does not do it. By and by I get 
angry, and put my spurs into him, and 
say, " Get up ! " and he gets up — for 
that is the first time that I have come 
into the sphere where he lives. 

2329. Discrimination in Preaching, 
— All sickness is not just the same, 
and all medical prescription is not just 
the same. If the physician is called 
to one who is easily touched, one 
whom the shadow of medicine, falling 
on him, cures, he gives him attenuated 
remedies ; but if he is called to a great 
cast-iron man, whose nerves lie bedded 
deep, and are thread-like at that, and 
who is hard to be made to feel and to 
be made to move, the physician will 
put into him raking medicines which 
would kill a sensitive, nervous person. 
Although, ordinarily, it is not best for 
men to take harsh and purgative 
medicines, it is better to do that than 
to die. The means to be employed 
are relative to the end you propose to 
gain, and the circumstances of the 
case. The remedy must be adapted 
to the patient and his needs. 

2330. Substantial Thought in 
Preaching. — While the early preach- 
ing of Jesus seems to have been of 
the most arousing character, we are 
not to suppose that instructiveness was 
sacrificed, nor that the next period, 
beginning with the " Sermon on the 
Mount," was devoid of pungency be- 



cause the instructive elements pre- 
dominated. Only to arouse men, and 
to leave them no solid substance of 
thought, is to kindle a fire of shavings 
that but flames up and dies in ashes. 

2331. Good Thoughts Not Apphed. 
— If a minister preaches real thoughts, 
but leaves them without application 
he is like a man who draws a bucket 
of water from a deep, deep well, 
good water, clear, cold, wholesome ; 
and, just as he brings the bucket up 
within a few feet of the curb, he fastens 
it there, where you can't reach it, and 
leaves you thirsty. A cup of water 
that you cannot reach is as far off 
from you two feet below the face of 
the well as if it were at the bottom 
again ! 

2332. The Preacher's Opportunities. 
— The events that take place every 
day are God's furrows. It is the busi- 
ness of the pulpit to sow seeds of in- 
struction whenever any furrows open ; 
and the times we have been living in 
for the last few weeks [financial dis- 
turbances], the premonitions of which 
have been months in the air to the 
prophetic eye, are the ploughings of 
God. Now is our time to sow the seed 
of instruction. 

2333. Transientness of Sermons. — 
No matter if sermons are transient in 
their effects. So are drops of rain. 
But in both cases, shower follows 
shower, and, while no drop endures, 
the vegetable kingdom grows and 
thrives through all ages. Sermons 
perish, but men live. 

2334. The Average Congregation. — 
When I stand and look at my congre- 
gation, I am like a man in a picture- 
gallery. Here is a bright, radiant 
landscape. Right next to it is a land- 
scape that is storm-clad and dark. 
There is the picture of a calm, tran- 
quil sea. Right next to it is the pic- 
ture of a sea that is rough and bolster 



PREACHING 



497 



ous. Here is a scene of love. Right 
next to it is a tragic scene. There is 
a representation of wealth. Next to 
it is a representation of poverty. Thus 
throughout the picture-gallery the most 
striking contrasts are seen ; and I see 
just such contrasts when I stand and 
look from my pulpit. I see all these 
various conditions of life. I see light 
and dark shades commingled all 
through the congregation. Some- 
times I feel inclined to preach to 
those who are hopeful. At other 
times I cannot help preaching to those 
who are in darkness and great trouble. 

2335. Individual Preaching. — A 
bunch of needles put together is as 
blunt as a board ; but if you take each 
one out, and use it by itself, it is sharp, 
and pierces. If men are called to re- 
pentance in a bunch, they will be very 
apt to repent in a bunch, and their re- 
pentance will be very superficial. 

2336. The Preacher a Man-Builder. 
— When a master-builder goes to the 
forest for material, he does not take 
trees of any and every kind, and then 
put them together at haphazard, or so 
as to accommodate his building to the 
form of the trees. The trees must 
conform to the house that is to be. 
The builder carries in his eye the fu- 
ture house, and selects his trees from 
the wood by the known wants of the 
house ; this one for a sill, that one for 
a corner-post, others for beams, and 
so on. Thus all truths, all sermons, 
are merely subordinate material and 
instruments ; the preacher's real end 
is to be found in the soul-building 
that is going on. He is an artist of 
living forms, of invisible colors ; an 
architect of a house not built with 
hands — Jesus Christ, the foundation. 

2337. Varied Material in Preaching. 
— Go, ye that have lived in a cold phi- 
losophy, and cannot understand how 
a man may turn on every side to find 



truth as in a forest he looks on every 
side for sticks of timber with which 
to build his house. Every minister 
ought to turn towards every gleam of 
light to see if there is not some instru- 
ment by which he can better touch 
the hearts of men. 

2338. External Pulpit Influences : 
Helpful. — If, when a man feels that 
his life-power is consecrated to trans- 
forming the human soul towards the 
higher ideal of character for time and 
eternity, he looks around upon the 
great forces of the world and says to 
them, "You are my servants" ; to 
the clouds, " Give me what you have 
of power" ; to the hills, "Bring me 
of your treasures"; to all that is 
beautiful, " Come and put your gar- 
ment upon me" ; and to all that is 
enjoyable, " Fill me with force, and 
give abundance to the fullness of my 
feeling" — if a man makes himself 
master of the secrets of nature that he 
may have power and strength to do 
his work — then he is not carrying on 
three or four kinds of business at the 
same time. He is carrying one busi- 
7tess, and he collects from a hundred 
the materials and forces by which he 
does it. 

2339. External Pulpit Influences : 
Harmful. — If, when a man comes back 
from his garden, his lectures, his 
journeys, and his esthetic studies, or 
from his scientific coteries and seances, 
he finds himself less interested in his 
proper work ; if the Sabbath is getting 
to be rather a burdensome day to 
him, and it is irksome to be preach- 
ing, he must quit one or other of those 
things. The stream runs from the 
pulpit instead of into it. 

2340. Spiritual Truth the Pulpit 
Theme. — I hold that, in a proper way, 
there is no theory or philosophy 
which relates to the welfare of states, 
or communities, or families, or indi- 



498 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



viduals, or to any part of a man's life, 
that may not be discussed in the pul- 
pit, and measured by the law of love, 
and truth, and justice. But when a 
man tells me that the power of the 
pulpit is to be the discussion of social 
tpicstions, and that that is to be the 
chief clement of the ministry, I look 
upon him with amazement. Give me 
the root of the oak, and I will very 
soon produce the leaves ; but if I have 
only the leaves of the oak, can I with 
them produce the root? All these 
various subjects are but outgrowths, 
the branches, the leaves of the great 
central spiritual truths that evolve the 
nature of God and man, and reveal 
man's destiny. 

2341. Christ's Preaching. — Do you 
note our Lord's example in preaching ? 
Did expositions of the Old Testament 
or disquisitions upon the reigning 
themes of religion fill up his dis- 
courses ? Did he consider human 
affairs as too vulgar, and social life 
too secular, and the natural world too 
unreligious for his sermons? His ser- 
mons reflect all passing events. Birds 
sang in his discourses ; the grass grew 
in his pulpit ; flowers blossomed there ! 
Now the vineyard was his text ; then 
the husbandman and his oxen ; the 
steward and his shrewd calculations ; 
the exchange and its coins ; the civil 
tribunal; the army and the tax-gath- 
erer ; the publican and the courtesan. 
He discoursed upon the dispositions, 
the thoughts, the errors, the virtues, 
the strifes or necessities of the age in 
which he lived, and of the people 
right before him. He spoke, too, 
about religious things, not in the sa- 
cred phrase of the Temple and the 
Synagogue, but in the familiar lan- 
guage which men employ in every- 
day life. 

2342. Paul's " Christ Crucified." — 
It did not enter into Paul's contempla- 



tion that he would not preach about 
war and peace ; public and private 
economy ; whatever, in brief, had ref- 
erence to the welfare of men individ- 
ually and collectively. Only this is to 
be inferred from his declaration : 
" Whatever themes I discuss, it is 
upon the supernatural, divine power 
that I rely for success." This course 
was a stepping-stone out of the then ap- 
proved method of religious teaching. 

But in our day, Paul's very origi- 
nality, and this very declaration of 
his new liberty, have become the 
standing authority for routine ; for 
conventional teaching ; for a restric- 
tion of liberty in the pulpit. That 
which was a declaration of pulpit in- 
dependence has become a declaration 
of pulpit bondage. It is the impres- 
sion of large classes of men — some 
of them most excellent men — that the 
Sabbath-day is too good to be spent 
in discussing any topics that are not 
strictly rehgious, and the church is a 
place too holy to be employed for 
speaking upon anything except reli- 
gious doctrines and technically Gospel 
truths. The introduction into the pul- 
pit of what are called secular subjects 
is not considered to be in consonance 
with the Word of God, or the example 
of Christ, or the declaration of the 
Apostle, who says, " I determined not 
to know anything among you save 
Jesus Christ, and him crucified." 

This is a misinterpretation, a per- 
version, a falsification of the whole 
temper and meaning of the language 
of the Apostle. 

2343. Caution with New Ideas. — 
There is nothing in this world that re- 
quires such long seasoning and ripen- 
ing as new thoughts. Men seem to 
think that the pulpit ought to be like 
an apple-press where greedy boys 
run, and each sticks his straw into the 
vat, and sucks the unfermented juice. 



PREACHING 



499 



The farmer would say to the boys, 
" No, let the juice stand, and let the 
impurities be worked off; and then, 
in six or eight months, you will see 
the real, true cider, or wine of the 
apples." And so it is with truth. It 
takes longer for the truth to work 
itself free from impurities than any 
other thing. Only after it has some 
age do you know the real quality of 
truth. The truth requires the concur- 
rent thoughts of myriads of men, to 
give it confirmation. God does not 
reveal the truth through single heads, 
but by multitudes and through the 
ages. Therefore, for a man who 
thinks he has a brilliant idea to rush 
at once into publicity with it, is not 
acting in the spirit of true charity, nor 
according to the dictates of sound 
philosophy. 

2344. Truth to be Adopted to 
Hearers. — I have heard a great many 
people criticise the ministry, and say, 
" They don't preach all they believe." 
You may depend upon it they don't. 
That is as if a hardy old trapper, from 
the borders of the continent, living in 
the open air, capacious of mouth and 
capacious of belly, should walk into a 
hospital, and, looking at the diet of 
the sick man there, should say, 
"Good heavens! these doctors are 
not sincere. See how they eat at 
home, and then see what stuff they 
give to these creatures here ! Why, 
they ought to give them chunks of 
beef!" Ought they? Ought a man 
to teach his little children as he 
teaches grown folks ? Ought a man 
to diet sick folks as he diets the well ? 

2345. The Gospel and Public Af- 
fairs. — He that does not know how 
wisely to meddle with public sins in 
preaching the Gospel, does not know 
how to preach the Gospel. What 
would you think of one of the 
Apostles in the time of Christ, who 



had been commissioned to give sight 
to the blind and hearing to the deaf, 
if he had gone about reading dis- 
courses on medicine and never curing 
anybody ? And what is the use of 
preaching a theology that does not 
disturb and cure ? Is the Gospel a 
sing-song lullaby to put people to 
sleep in carnal indulgences, to give 
peace to men in their sins ? 

2346. Fertility in Freedom. — Lib- 
erty in prophesying is more fruitful 
than restraint can be. A good, rich, fat 
soil always has weeds, but to refuse 
cultivation of the soil because if you 
begin to cultivate it you will have 
weeds, is not good husbandry. Keep 
down the weeds by cultivation — not 
by refusing to sow grain. Where 
there is liberty, especially in the 
earlier period of transition, of course 
there will be difficulties ; but the 
difficulties are fewer than the objec- 
tions to liberty, and they cure them- 
selves. 

2347. Liberty in the Pulpit. — All 
liberty is intoxicating. If you bring 
up a generation of young men with 
this doctrine of freedom in the pulpit, 
you must expect that many will be 
imprudent, and foolish, and mischiev- 
ous. And when men point to them 
and say, "There, that is the fruit of 
your famous liberty of the pulpit," we 
may reply, " The beginnings of greater 
freedom are like the beginnings of 
daylight." When Christ had touched 
the man's eyes once, he said, " I see 
men as trees walking." When he had 
touched them twice — that is, when he 
had given him more of the same sort 
— he saw every man clearly. If a 
little Uberty does not make men stable, 
give them more of it. Put responsi- 
bility on them, forbear with their mis- 
takes, encourage them, and when the 
pressure of responsibility is more and 
more realized, they will be more sta- 



500 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



ble, and move in larger circuits, and 
with more glory to God, and quicker 
salvation to the human family. 

2348. Preaching : Politics and Com- 
merce. — Have you a church that is like 
a boy's play-room, and am I to stand 
and play on my trumpet for the amuse- 
ment of the nursery ? Am I to see 
humanity damaged to its very core ; 
am I to see the nation shaken to its 
deepest foundations ; am I to see 
God's cause in imminent peril, and 
must I remember that I am a minister, 
and not talk about these things ? Was 
that the course that made Isaiah and 
Jeremiah what they were ? 

2349. New Aspects of Truth not to be 
Hastily Preached. — I am very sensitive 
about the preaching of things that will 
unsettle faith, about turning up new 
ground in which there may be unlim- 
ited quantities of malaria, and of wan- 
tonly bringing in unbelief instead of 
belief. I am sent of God to save men ; 
but I am to win them by gradual ap- 
proaches, by education, and by giving 
them the light by which they shall re- 
ceive the fullness of the new truth, see 
it, and feed on it. To bring a man off 
from his old faith before he is estab- 
lished at all, or prepared to be estab- 
lished, in the new, is wanton ; it is 
mischief-breeding ; it is wicked. 
Therefore no man should rashly and 
hastily teach new truths, or truths that 
are new to him. 

2350. New Truth to be Separated 
from Error. — All truth in the begin- 
ning is very much like gold at first. 
There is more rock than gold, and it is 
only after it has been stamped and 
ground to powder, and has gone 
through the chemical bath, that the 
gold is separated from the dross. The 
pulpit may be preaching new things 
destructively, in combating with the 
old, and a people may be unsettled in 
the old forms of belief, without being 



rooted in the new. I take it for 
granted that if I had preached thirty 
years ago what I preach now, it would 
have been a great mischief to you ; 
but I have been cautious, and have 
held back. When I think a thing to 
be true, and have proved it to be true, 
God has given me the courage of ex- 
phcitness, and of thunder if it was 
needed. Men think I am careless and 
without caution ; but until compara- 
tively recent years I have not preached 
truths that lay on the horizon in my 
mind for thirty years. 

2351. Essentials of Theology and 
Preaching. — Any true theology must 
have power to convince men of sin ; 
it must have power to convert men, 
and build them up in holy life ; and it 
must have power to sustain them in all 
the emergencies of human life by the 
sense of an infinite and eternal life — a 
life in the near future. It must have 
power to insjjire men with the gran- 
deur of that life which is only kindled 
here, but which extends itself into the 
hereafter. All preaching and all 
schemes which leave out the bound- 
lessness of the great invisible world, 
that are made up of mere ingenuities, 
and that have no tidings, no voice 
from beyond, will be futile. They may 
be beautiful ; and so is the moon ; but 
what harvest was ever the child of the 
moon? 

2352. God and Man. — God's love 
because of his fatherhood ; man's 
worth and mutual brotherhood be- 
cause of his sonship to God : — These 
are the two halves of the one great 
theme. ... I was like the man in 
the story to whom the fairy gave a 
purse with a single piece of money 
in it, which he found always came 
again as soon as he had spent it. 1 
thought I had found at least one thing 
to preach : I found it included every- 
thing. 



REFORMS 



501 



2353. The Christ-Heart in the Chris- 
tian Ministry. — The marrow of the 
ministry as an instructor is sympathetic 
personal influence. A man may have 
sympathy for God and not any for 
man. That is not uncommon. A man 
may have sympathy for the truth. I 
hear a vast deal about the importance 
of the truth, of sound words, of a 
sound system of doctrine. " Maintain 
the truth " — all of which is very good 
indeed ; but it is outside of the Gos- 



pel. The Gospel is love. If one has 
not a Christ-heart and a Christlike- 
ness he is not the typical minister of 
Christ. 

2354. Theology and Preaching. — 
Others may blow the bellows, and turn 
the doctrines in the fire, and lay them 
on the anvil of controversy, and beat 
them with all sorts of hammers into all 
sorts of shapes ; but I shall busy my- 
self with usmg the sword of the Lord, 
not vcv forging it. 



XL, REFORMS 



2355. New Truth from Single 
Men. — Truth never enters the world as 
an army a thousand men abreast. 
Truth always comes as John the Bap- 
tist came, in the wilderness, clothed 
in camel's hair, and eating locusts and 
wild honey for the most part. 

Were it better that Luther should 
have been silenced when he stood al- 
most alone against the power of the 
world? Were it better that Tyndale 
should have been hindered when he 
sought to bring to light the truth, at a 
time when it was considered very dan- 
gerous to do it, by a translation of the Sa- 
cred Scriptures ? Was not his liberty 
for the good of the world ? Was it better 
that Wesley should follow the orders 
of his bishop, or the motions of the Di- 
vine Spirit? When God sends new 
hght he sends single stars. The star 
that overhung the Babe of Bethlehem 
was an illustration as well as a phe- 
nomenon. 

2356. Power of Weakness Allied 
with God. — If you look at the efforts 
of the most learned statesmen, if you 
look at the most laborious plans and 
the wisest endeavors of the chief men 
of almost every nation, you will find 
that they have toiled and labored to 
build up things that stood only while 
they had their hand upon them — and 



hardly as long as that. Laws have 
been overthrown almost before the 
face of men that thought they had 
done most curious and wonderful 
things in the scale of legislation. Ad- 
ministrations have ceased almost be- 
fore the last note had rung upon them 
in their structure. The things that 
men have done in their own strength 
have been things that have scarcely 
outlived their makers. 

Now compare with these things the 
things that were wrought out through 
the weakness of the ApostoHc period. 
The men that were the offscouring of 
the world ; the men that died deaths 
daily ; the men that had neither coun- 
try nor home, nor friends ; the men 
that arrayed themselves against the 
organized power of the world ; the 
men that seemed to be fanatical and 
insane ; the men that were charged 
with madness, and seemed to live in a 
perpetual hallucination and phantasy ; 
the men that lifted themselves up in 
their weakness in opposition to mon- 
archs, and priests, and statesmen, and 
literature, and learning, and institu- 
tions — what did these men do but rev- 
olutionize the globe? And in imita- 
tion of these, how did Savonarola in 
Italy, Hussin Bohemia, and the noble 
army of reformers in Germany and in 



502 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



England, out of obscurity, oppose 
themselves to the most august powers 
and dignitaries and customs and opin- 
ions of the world ! How did they 
bear up in their weakness until they 
became strength like adamant ! The 
things that have seemed the weakest 
and the most worthless, have been the 
things that have lived and grown. 
For weakness with God behind it is 
omnipotent, and strength that is God- 
less is as a spider's web. 

2357- The Pulpit and Reforms. — 
The day has gone by in which men 
said they could not teach of Slavery 
in the pulpit, because they were or- 
dained to preach the Gospel and not 
to go into all the moral reforms which 
might be scared up. This is as if a 
man, a physician, called to a case of 
desperate disease — cholera, plague, 
or what not — should refuse to consider 
that, saying, " I am educated to 
spread abroad a knowledge of hygiene 
in general ; but I don't meddle with 
such cases in particular." A church 
that teaches men in general, and 
touches no particular instances, is as 
dry as a thousand-year-old dead man. 
The same is true as to Intemperance. 
I beheve that the pulpit that will not 
give forth its influence on that subject 
is already vacant and void. This pre- 
tence that a man is to preach the Gos- 
pel and not touch a single one of the 
things which the Gospel is meant to heal 
— a wayfaring man, though a fool, 
would understand the fallacy of that ; 
but there be many fools that are not 
wayfarers who don't seem to under- 
stand it. 

2358. The Church and the World. 
— It is the most hideous form of sel- 
fishness out of hell — this attempt of a 
great moral institution, that is set to be 
the light of the world, and the teacher 
of men in every visible relation in life, 
and that is ordained to lay the law of 



God on thought and feehng and con- 
duct, to draw back from its great 
work, and say, " It is not our business 
to take care of these things." It is 
fundamental apostasy. It is egregious 
recreancy. And that dark-lantern 
church that shines on nothing outside, 
and only on that which is inside of 
itself, does not belong to Christ. 

2359. Getting and Giving. — A rich 
church ought to be like a fire-engine, 
which sucks in at one end and spurts 
out at the other, putting out the fire of 
hell which the devil is always kindhng. 

2360. Selfish Churches. — I am 
ashamed to see great churches, whose 
wealth is counted by miUions, build 
themselves stately houses, give to 
them everything that can make them 
comfortable in the pew, attractive in 
the choir, eloquent and desirable in the 
pulpit, and when they have done, pay 
their minister and all the expenses lib- 
erally, and then sit themselves down 
and fold around themselves the robe 
of complacency, saying, "There, if 
the Lord doesn't think we have done 
well, he is unreasonable." What 
have they done, but for themselves.'' 
They have embellished the chariot 
which is carrying them to heaven, as 
they think, — though sometimes that is 
a mistake. 

2361. Christian Unity. — Shall a man 
say, in the heat of battle, as at Gettys- 
burg, to the man by his side, " Before I 
fight with you any longer, I must 
know what your notions are about the 
creed"? Is he responsible for what 
that man believes? There is one 
thing on which they are agreed, and 
that is patriotism ; and being agreed 
on that, let them work together for 
patriotic ends. Because I work with 
a man in a thing about which he and 
I are agreed, I am not responsible for 
the other things about which we are 
not agreed. 



REFORMS 



503 



2362. Patience in Reform. — A man 
gives out his plan of a house to an 
architect, and goes to Europe. In six 
months' time he comes back, and 
thinks he is going to move right in. 
When he arrives at the spot there is 
nothing but brick and stone and mor- 
tar and scaffolding, and all sorts of 
litter, dirt, and confusion. He is 
amazed at it. But in proportion to 
the elaborateness and largeness of the 
dwelling is the time that is required to 
construct it. So it is with moral ideas 
in the community, educating the whole 
people, enabling men to look without 
prejudice upon truth, and bringing 
them forward step by step. It is very 
slow work, and ministers, reformers, 
teachers of schools, parents, and all 
those whose desires are set for the 
furtherance of the welfare of men 
have need of patience, great pa- 
tience. 

2363. Civic Preaching. — Suppose a 
plant should be endowed with momen- 
tary intelligence, and should cry out 
and protest that it was potted in bad 
earth, and surrounded by poisonous 
vapors ! And suppose the earth should 
say, " Mind your own business, and I 
will mind mine;" and the atmos- 
phere should say, "You take care of 
yourself and I will take care of my- 
self"? It would be very much hke 
these enemies to society saying to us, 
when we raise our voice against them, 
" You ministers, mind your own busi- 
ness ! " That is just what we are do- 
ing. Our own business is to breathe 
and to grow, and we must have pure 
air and good soil. And if we are liv- 
ing in a community where we find our 
roots starved, and our leaves poisoned, 
we have a right to take care of our- 
selves and defend ourselves. 

2364. Ministers and Reform of Evils. 
— Men seem to think that if it were 
not for the meddhng of ministers and 



impertinent philanthropists running 
about and interfering with saloon- 
keepers and all manner of people that 
have an interest in corruption, it would 
be a great deal better. These people 
do not want to be meddled with. 
Neither did Sodom and Gomorrah 
want to be meddled with ; they wanted 
to be left free to pursue their evil 
courses : and wicked men are full of 
high-swelling and contemptuous words 
against those who are meddlers, as 
they call them. 

2365. The Saloon. — 

" But if the ox were wont to push 
with his horn in time past, and it hath 
been testified to his owner, and he hath 
not kept him in, but that he hath 
killed a man or a woman; the ox 
shall be stoned, and his owner also 
shall be put to death." 

Is there a rumseller in this town that 
does not know what it is to have his 
cups push with the horns ? Is there a 
man that is selling liquid damnation, 
day and night, who does not know 
what is the peril that it carries with it? 
Do not we know that there are ten 
thousand devihsh bulls that push with 
the horns as dangerously as any 
animal, and that intoxicating drink is 
one of them? And is the reckless 
dealer in such drink to go scot-free ? 
Might we not wisely go back for our 
laws to the desert, and take counsel 
of Moses and the old Israelites ? 

2366. The Radiance of Fidelity. — 
In the days of anti-slavery, here and 
there were men who dared to speak 
out ; but the great majority, certainly 
in the East, were afraid for their pul- 
pits, afraid of their parishioners, and 
they used to say, "We hate slavery as 
much as anybody, but then, we be- 
lieve in moderation. Why should a 
man sacrifice himself unnecessarily ? 
Why should a young man throw away 
his prospects? Why should a man 
who has a standing that is becoming 



504 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



more and more influential put it in 
peril, and lose his power ? Every- 
body, your friends, your parish, your 
best men, your wisest men, are sorry 
that you are even soiled with the anti- 
slavery heresy ; but as to going into 
the fight and making a martyr of 
yourself, why the whole world will 
cry shame on you!" Yet to-day, 
even so soon as now, what men are 
more honored in American history 
than these very ones who were mobbed 
and hissed, and who died poor and in 
obscurity, but whose names now shine 
out as stars in the firmament of 
heaven ? 

2367. Reform Arouses Complaint. — 
How perfectly sweet and gentle that 
little brook is that runs through the 
meadow ! Put an obstruction six 
inches high across it, and see how it 
will complain day and night. Every 
minute it murmurs its complaint. 
Build the obstruction higher, and see 
how its voice increases ! Build it still 
higher, and see how it pours itself over 
complaining incessantly and loudly. 
It is not until you lay an obstruction 
across the passions of men that you 
know the force of that stream which 
you are checking. 

2368. The Reformer's Truth. — If 
there were a hundred violins together, 
all playing below concert pitch, and I 
should take a real Cremona, and with 
the hand of a Paganini should bring it 
strongly up to the true key, and then 
should sweep my bow across it like a 
storm, and make it sound forth clear 
and resonant, what a demoniac jargon 
would the rest of the playing seem ! 
Yet the other musicians would be en- 
raged at me. They would think all 
the discord was mine, and I should be 
to them a demoniac. So it is with re- 
formers. The world thinks the discord 
is with them, and not in its own false 
playing. 



2369. The Forerunner. — John was 
Christ's forerunner, as the ploughman 
goes before the sower. Before good 
work can be expected, there must be 
excitement. The turf-bound surface 
of communities must be torn up, the 
compacted soil turned to the air and 
light. Upon the rough furrows, and 
not on the shorn lawn, is there hope 
for the seed. 

2370. Social Proprieties Disre- 
garded. — It is best for me to walk the 
street clad ; but if I were working in 
the street at a fire, and a child were 
in danger of perishing in the flames, I 
would strip off my coat to rescue that 
child ; and I would say to every man 
and boy, "Off with your coat and 
help ; " but suppose one, hearing that, 
should go about saying, " Beecher 
teaches that a man ought to walk the 
street with his coat off " ! For battle, 
one thing ; for peace, another. 

2371. Disturbance the Price of Prog- 
ress. — When anything starts out 
anew in progressive unfolding, men 
scoff and say, " See what sort of scum 
it sdrs up. See what kind of people 
it produces. See how things run to- 
gether. See what quarrelings there 
are. See what ups and downs there 
are on every hand." I should like to 
know if John the Baptist came with 
robes and velvet slippers. I should 
like to know if he did not come eating 
locusts and wild honey. I should like 
to know if when he came he was not 
rude and hirsute, and if all reforma- 
tions do not come with flails. I should 
like to know if the world has traveled 
in smooth paths. I should like to 
know if from the beginning there have 
not been attritions, and quarrels, and 
contendons. Has there been any- 
thing else? Has not God produced 
every great element of change by tears? 
Tears and blood have been the cement 
by which God has built this world. 



REFORMS 



50^ 



2372. Disturbances of Reform. — 
The woman of the house says, " I 
will have neatness here," and behold 
her upon her knees on the floor (I am 
speaking of the old-fashioned times) ; 
and behold the floor all covered with 
dirt and soap and water. Through 
dirt she gets neatness. First comes 
the scrubbing ; then after the scrub- 
bing comes the dry and cleanly floor. 
So it is with all processes of cleaning 
or polishing. Brilliance is what is 
wanted on the shield, and it is bur- 
nished ; but the substances by which 
that brilliance is brought out are 
blacking and'disfiguring. 

2373. Conflict Leading to Peace. — 
The inward, the philosophic tendency 
of a thing may be one way, while its 
external course may be another way. 
Thus, a medicine may have in it a 
tendency towards health and comfort, 
and that too through days and weeks 
and months when it is working dis- 
comfort. All the stages of the opera- 
tion of a medicine may be disquieting, 
and yet it may be bearing health and 
comfort to the patient. And so a 
moral course may be tending towards 
peace, omnipotently ; and yet, at 
every step of the way it may be a 
cause of conflict. 

2374. Freedom of Speech. — Free 
speech is to a great people what winds 
are to oceans and malarial regions, 
which waft away the elements of dis- 
ease, and bring new elements of 
health. And where free speech is 
stopped miasma is bred, and death 
comes fast. 

2375. Condemnation not Reforma- 
tion. — I may lay a diseased man on 
the surgeon's table, and demonstrate 
morbid anatomy all day long ; but it 
does not cure a man to demonstrate 
his disease. To reveal evil is not 
necessarily the way to cure it. They 
are not the men that are doing the 



world the most good who, with tongue 
as with a surgeon's knife, go into 
society cutting and slashing, and mak- 
ing the blood flow on every side. 

2376. Respect for Prejudices. — 
Suppose a surgeon should go into a 
household where a man had a vast 
wen on his neck, and, while he shook 
hands with him very gently with one 
hand, should hit the wen a terrible 
blow with the other ; and suppose, 
when the man complained that that 
was rude treatment, the surgeon 
should say, " Oh, that is nothing but 
a wen. It is no part of you. I have 
no idea of respecting your wen. I 
respect jou ; but that wen has noth- 
ing to do with you." Such a sur- 
geon would be like many reformers, 
who, because they are men of truth, 
and perceiving that other men have 
many prejudices and superstitions, 
strike them, justifying themselves by 
saying, "They are superstitions ; they 
are prejudices : am I bound to respect 
these?" No, perhaps not; but you 
are bound to respect the palpitating 
heart that lies behind them. 

2377. Temper Provoking Temper. 
— We are called to expose men's 
errors, and rebuke their wrongs, and 
correct their faults ; and we can do it 
with our claws or with our lips. We 
can do it as animals, or as angels. 
We can do it in the spirit of wrong, or 
we can do it in the spirit of right. 
We can do it with pride and temper, 
or we can do it with love. The ad- 
ministration of rebuke by the lower 
feelings, invariably excites the lower 
feelings of those who are exposed to 
this tempest and this storm. The feel- 
ing that you carry to a man you will 
awaken in him. 

2378. Unwise Reformers. — When I 
was a boy, and I would go over to 
Aunt Bull's, who had several ugly 
dogs about her premises, I used to go 



5o6 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



barefooted, and make as little noise as 
possible, and climb over fences, and 
go a roundabout way, so as, if possi- 
ble, to get into the house before the 
dogs knew that I was coming. If I 
had acted as many reformers do, I 
should have gone with my pockets 
full of stones, and fired handful after 
handful at the dogs ; and in the uni- 
versal barking and hullabaloo should 
have said, " See what a condition of 
things this is ! What a reformation is 
needed here ! How the dogs bark and 
bite!" Who made them bite? 
Thousands of men are set to barking, 
and thousands of men are set venom- 
ously to biting, because that which 
is bad in them is so treated that it is 
roused up, not only into oppugnancy, 
but into dominancy. 

2379. Reforms and Reformers. — 
God calls men to work for reforms, 
but he never calls them to work for 
reform as if they were crocodiles with 
gnashing teeth. I really think the 
greatest obstacle to some reformations 
is the ugliness, the harshness, the bit- 
terness, the uncharitableness, the un- 
symmetry, the moral unbeauty of the 
men who advocate them. The re- 
forms are well enough, but I cannot 
always swallow the reformers. Re- 
formers must be fighters, but the pre- 
scription of the Bible is, " Speaking 
the truth in love." You cannot speak 
the truth in love and be long unbeau- 
tiful. The man that can thunder one 
moment and shed tears the next is the 
man most likely to carry a reform. 

2380. Fanatical Reformers. — When 
an August day has been lowering, and 
murky, and there is no air to be 
breathed, and every man wilts, by 
and by there comes a roaring thunder- 
crack in the heavens, and the wind 
swings from the south to the north, 
and sweeps out all the poisoned air, 
and men stand up and say, " Bless 



God for such a thunder, and for such 
a storm ! " 

Now and then you come across a 
robust, ugly-mouthed man, who talks, 
and fights, and deals heavy blows 
against wickedness ; and everybody is 
afraid to come near him ; but each 
one, standing back, says, "Good! 
good ! how it does my soul good to see 
one man that knows how to give it to 
them ! " But if you did your duty, 
there would not be such a need of 
single men to undertake this work. 
What are called " fanatics " and " ex- 
tremists " are only the men that God 
sends to make up the general average 
which your unfaithfulness lowers. 

2381. Medicinal Power of Chris- 
tianity, — Christianity says, "There is 
a bright beyond. Hope in the future 
and be strong." We not only can 
thus medicate men and institutions, 
but we can alleviate the disorders and 
troubles that spring up in the working 
of the process among ourselves. We 
are told that the deity Hera sent ser- 
pents to strangle the young Hercules, 
in his cradle ; and the serpents are 
running to and fro swiftly and sting- 
ing among ourselves — crimes, vices, 
lusts, appetites, and intemperance in 
a hundred forms ; and men look, and 
oftentimes say, "These things will at 
last eat out the very life of the nation," 
and they preach discouragement. 
Such men are descended from the 
bats. Though they cannot yet see, 
they will evolve rapidly, I hope. 
These are the men who say, " You 
can't cure these intestine disorders in 
society." I say you can. 

2382. Peace Begins in Confusion. — 
When summer comes to Alpine re- 
gions, it comes to bring harvest-flow- 
ers, flocks, and melodious songs in all 
the air ; but when summer, coming to 
bring music and abundance and peace, 
begins its sway, its first work is to melt 



BENEVOLENCE 



507 



the snow, and down thunder ava- 
lanches innumerable, carrying wreck 
and ruin in their path. Torrents 
swell to floods, and cover the fields 
with destructive freshets. And the 
earth is full of conflict and confusion 
at the first steps of that summer which 



is to bring harvests and peace and joy. 
And so the advance of God's kingdom 
in this world is through confusion to 
peace ; through darkness to light ; 
through rectification with pains and 
penalties to that final harmony which 
is the prediction of the Scripture, 



XLI. BENEVOLENCE 



2383. Selfish Men, Solitary. — The 
man who has lived for himself has the 
privilege of being his own mourner 
when he dies. 

2384. " Charity Begins at Home." 
— There is a good deal of benevolence, 
but it does not get about much. It 
stays at home, for the most part and 
does not become acquainted with its 
neighbors. 

2385. Giving. — There are some 
men that give as springs do. Whether 
you go to them or not they are always 
full, and your part is merely to put 
your dish under the over-flowing 
stream. Others give just as a pump 
does where the well is dry and the 
pump leaks ! 

2386. Generosity and Benevolence. 
— Generosity is the kindness of the 
lower nature ; benevolence is the kind- 
ness of the higher nature. The one 
carries with it the sense element ; the 
other carries with it the sou/ element. 
Generosity is the kindness of our bod- 
ily life and the faculties which are 
more immediately connected with it ; 
benevolence is the kindness of the 
soul-life and the faculties belonging to 
it. Generosity is the militia that enlist 
for three months, while benevolence is 
the regular force that enlist for the 
war. 

2387. Benevolence Limited. — Be- 
nevolence has a speaking acquaintance 
with almost all men's faculties, and 
that is all. It is intimate and visits in 
only one or two places in men's minds. 



2388. Generosity, not Benevolence. 

— Many generous men are not benevo- 
lent men. There are a great many 
who live in fragmentary, unconnected 
kindnesses. They are ready to relieve 
trouble when it comes to them. When 
a want is presented to them, they give 
it a moment's notice, and only a mo- 
ment's. Everything that touches them 
receives an instant response, but that 
is all. 

If a little child goes past a piano and 
strikes it, and returns and strikes it 
again, and passes it again, and strikes 
it yet again, it certainly produces 
musical sounds ; but what is the report 
of a piano touched by the random 
finger of a vagrant child, compared 
with the magnificent pressures of him 
that has a theme which his broad and 
multiplex hand is evoking through all 
the harmonies and progressions of this 
lordly instrument ? There should be 
intelligence, and connection, and plan, 
and sequence, and application in our 
benevolence. 

2389. Giving and Receiving. — He 
who selfishly hoards his joys, thinking 
thus to increase them, is like a man 
who looks at his granary, and says, 
" Not only will I protect my grain 
from mice and birds, but neither the 
ground nor the mill shall have it." 
And so, in the spring, he walks around 
his little pit of corn, and exclaims, 
" How wasteful are my neighbors, 
throwing away whole handfuls of 
grain!" But autumn conies; and, 



5o8 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



while he has only his few poor bush- 
els, their fields are yellow with an 
abundant harvest. " There is that 
scattereth and yet increaseth." 

2390. Unchristian Givers. — When I 
was in California I went down eighteen 
hundred feet to see where they dug 
gold. The influx of water was such 
that the mightiest engines were em- 
ployed, at vast expense, to draw it up 
from the bottom, and throw it out, I 
thought to myself, "About such en- 
ginery is required to get money out of 
some rich men. ' ' They are not ready ; 
they are peevish ; they are suspicious ; 
they hedge themselves about so that 
they shall not be subjected to impor- 
tunity ; and when they do give, they 
give as a man gives a tooth to the 
dentist. 

2391. Affinity, and Benevolence. — 
When you walk along the street and 
notice a cluster of children that are 
rosy, and well dressed, and comely, 
and well behaved, you are not with- 
out the greatest interest in them. You 
are attracted towards them. But you 
will observe that it is admiration and 
sympathy that you feel in beholding 
them. For when on turning the cor- 
ner you perceive another group of 
children that are emaciated, somber 
of eye, and squalid, you are conscious 
of being drawn towards them just as 
powerfully, only by a very different 
feeling. In the first instance you sym- 
pathize with the health of the children, 
and with their apparent goodness. 
You rejoice in them, and with them. 
In the second instance you feel that it 
is because the children are so poor and 
miserable and needy, that you are 
drawn towards them. In tlie first 
place you are acting from the love of 
affinity, and in the second place you 
are acting from the love of benevo- 
lence, which are very different, one 
working towards the objects on ac- 



count of what they have, and the other 
working towards the objects on ac- 
count of what they have not. The 
qualities possessed, call out the first 
kind of love, and the qualities needed 
call out the second kind. 

2392. Personal Love, and Benevo- 
lence. — If I sought a child to carry in 
my bosom, I should seek one with a 
sweet disposition, and that had been 
well reared ; but if, in a spirit of be- 
nevolence, I sought a child that I 
might do it good, I should seek one 
that was uncared for, and I should 
feel that the lower and the worse it 
was, the more it needed me. Personal 
love always works upward ; but be- 
nevolence, or that love which is char- 
acterized by good-will and compassion, 
works also downward. 

2393. Almsgiving. — Jesus cautions 
his disciples against doing right things 
from wrong motives. They must give 
alms, not for the sake of reputation, 
not for their own interests, but out of a 
simple benevolence. The love of 
praise may go with benevolence, but 
must not take the place of it. It is 
hypocrisy to act from selfish motives, 
while obtaining credit for disinterested 
ones. The passing off of our baser 
feelings for our noblest is a species of 
moral counterfeiting as prevalent now 
as in the times of our Lord. 

2394. Pleasure of Doing Good. — 
Even selfish, avaricious men know in 
a very limited degree the pleasure of 
doing good. A man rides along a 
river's side, and hears a cry of distress. 
He is thinking how he can circumvent 
his neighbor and get the heavy end 
of a bargain ; but he springs out of 
his wagon, and goes and looks, and 
sees that a fellow man is in the water, 
and is sinking ; and he pulls him out, 
and saves his life ; and receives the 
man's thanks. This occurrence puts 
the bargain entirely out of his head. 



BENEVOLENCE 



509 



He does not think of it again during 
the whole day. When he gets home 
he tells his family what has happened ; 
and in the evening the neighbors come 
together, and he tells it over to them. 
For a whole week, everywhere he goes 
he has to tell how he saved a man's 
life. Really, it is a pleasure to the old 
fellow. It did not cost him anything 
either — that helped it, perhaps, but as 
long as he lives he remembers with 
agreeable sensations that he did that 
thing — and he ought to, because he 
has not many resources of that kind. 

2395. Goodness Finds Goodness. — 
A benevolent man sees wonderful in- 
dications of divine benevolence in na- 
ture, and in society, and the quality 
and beauty of benevolence in his fel- 
low men. A man that is himself full 
of benevolence, going out and walk- 
ing through the day, comes back at 
night, and marvels that there is so 
much gold streaked through the rock 
of human life. He finds what he car- 
ries. He is susceptible to that which 
is strong in himself. 

2396. Variations in Sympathy. — He 
is a bad man who does not sympathize 
with his own kin — though often you 
find men who do not do it. Not un- 
frequently you find that men who are 
benign on the street are ugly at home ; 
and, quite as frequently, you find that 
men who are hard, and whose teeth 
are like knives in business, are very 
saints at home. You could not pry 
open their hand with a burglar's tool 
on the street ; but when they go home 
it is broad open. They would not give 
anything outside of their household ; 
but if their wife and children want any- 
thing they readily grant it. If you 
saw them at home and nowhere else 
you would say that they were princes 
of generosity ; but if you saw them 
abroad and nowhere else you would 
say that they were tighter than the 



bark on growing trees. Now, we 
should expect a man to be in sympathy 
with those who bear his name and 
carry his blood ; but that is not enough. 
"If ye love them that love you, what 
thank have ye? " 

2397. Benevolence Needs Force. — 
The benevolent surgeon who cuts off 
the leg that is diseased and that would 
destroy the life of a fellow man if it 
were not cut off, and who has the en- 
ergy which enables him to destroy for 
the sake of saving — he is a truly be- 
nevolent man ; but the sapless man 
of benevolence, who faints when he 
sees a drop of blood — what use is he 
for a surgeon or anything else? You 
want to give a man a great deal of 
thunder if you are going to make much 
of him in the direction of benevolence. 

2398. Unwise Charity. — In the 
Roman Church the doctrine of charity 
was preached to such an extent that it 
was made one of the cardinal virtues, 
and was esteemed above almost every- 
thing else ; in the matter of personal 
service it was carried to saintship ; but 
the giving out of doles, the distribu- 
tion of bread perpetually, day by day, 
through institutions, by the hundred 
loaves, or by the five hundred loaves, 
was the means of educating men to 
indolence. The effect of constantly 
supplying men's wants in the supposed 
fulfillment of the duty of charity was 
to debauch the whole under-class in 
Italy. It made mendicancy there, with 
all its horrible train of vices and mis- 
eries, common. And that divine 
principle of beneficence which was 
meant to increase the sum of human 
happiness by making men more manly 
was perverted so that it corrupted man- 
hood in its very center, degraded men, 
and brought on them curses infinite. 

2399. Poor-Relief to Stimulate, not 
Enervate. — After England had passed 
from the state of an agricultural peo- 



510 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



l)le to that of a manufacturing people, 
concentrating capital, and gathering 
together vast bodies of laborers whose 
support depended upon the fluctuating 
conditions of the market of the world, 
there came an influx of want, at times, 
which it was attempted to meet by 
great bounties ; and workhouses and 
almshouses were multiplied till they 
corrupted and well-nigh destroyed the 
yeomanry of the land. The danger 
became so great (since a vast propor- 
tion of the lower classes were going 
into these workhouses and almshouses, 
and the very nerve of enterprise and 
industry was being cut, and the sense 
of shame which sensitive men natur- 
ally feel in being dependent was dis- 
appearing) that a reaction took place ; 
and for many years the statesmen of 
Great Britain labored, and successfully, 
to get back to something like the old 
condition of things, to put affairs on a 
better foundation, so that if there was 
rehef it should be administered in har- 
mony with this fundamental principle 
of self-love or self-care. 

2400. Good that Lives. — That 
which a man administers in his own 
life — his charities, his generosities, his 
minor benevolences — strewing with 
flowers instead of thorns the path 
where other people's feet are to tread, 
is surely well bestowed. It is a great 
thing for a man to be generous, and, 
seeing affliction and trouble, to follow 
his eye witli his hand ; but it is not the 
highest thing. There is that which is 
infinitely higher. It is noble to do 
good that shall produce its effect in 
the immediate present ; but it is nobler 
to organize or establish a larger good, 
that shall have its outcome not only in 
the present but also in the future ages. 
The one is living by sight, and the 
other is living by faith. 

2401. Wise Giving. — Mr. Vassar, 
of Poughkeepsie, while living, built. 



and saw in operation, a very noble 
monument of his benevolence. He 
lived to enjoy it. Peter Cooper lived 
a score of years to have the enjoyment 
of a wisely disposed charity from out 
of his large property. Late in life, Mr. 
Vandcrbilt founded and organized the 
University of Nashville, which is open 
and in full prosperity. Mr. Durant 
built the great college for women at 
Wellesley, in Massachusetts, and he 
lived to see to it that his charity was 
wisely employed. The man who earns 
money is far more apt to organize it 
into an institution wisely than any set 
of trustees into whose hands he can 
put it. It is a good thing, therefore, 
for a man who means to give when he 
dies, to consider that he is likely to die 
to-morrow ; and give to-day. 

2402. Longevity of Endowed Bene- 
factions. — If you liad countless wealth, 
and all the poor in Brooklyn should 
make procession by your house, and 
you should give them bountifully of 
your store, you could not do by your 
alms anything like the good that you 
would if you should build a hospital 
or some other charitable institution 
which would go on benefiting the 
poor long after you were dead. Your 
personal sympathy will reach but a 
little way ; but here is the sympathy of 
this organized wealth which will go on 
dealing with generations, and gener- 
ations, and generations ; and it will be 
just as fresh a thousand years hence, 
unwearied and unspent, as it was the 
hour when it was established. 

Oh ! what a benefaction for any 
man that has money, and has faith 
to see how it can work after he is 
gone, and a heart to set it to work! 
Being dead, he speaks, and speaks 
chorally. 

2403. Advantage in Organized Char- 
ity. — I admit that in a large popula- 
tion various difficulties occur from the 



BENEVOLENCE 



511 



deceptions of those who apply for 
charity. I also see that men are ex- 
cessively driven in their own business, 
and have not much time for personal 
sympathy, and that it is therefore 
cheaper for a man to say, " I can't go 
out and spend an hour in the day, not 
even for two months in the year : here 
is a hundred dollars." He puts it into 
the hands of an organization that has 
a clerk and a committee, and they do 
it for him. So a man, instead of 
grinding his own bread of charity, as 
in ancient days every house ground 
its own flour, sends his grist to the mill, 
and has it ground for him. 

2404. Danger in Organized Charity. 
— Organization for charity is rendered 
necessary by the exigencies of civi- 
hzation ; but it has its dangers as well 
as its benefits. The danger consists 
in this, that you will do your charity 
by machinery, and that you will give, 
you know not to whom, and that they 
receive they know not from whom ; 
and I tell you that the gift is not worth 
half so much to many and many a 
soul as the giver. You need to lay 
your heart alongside other hearts, that 
are as different from yours as can pos- 
sibly be. You need it, and they 
need it. 

2405. Alms, and Benevolence. — Ex- 
perience teaches us that there is nothing 
in the world so cheap as giving. If a 
poor man comes to my door, and I 
give him a quarter, and send him 
away, I buy my own peace with that 
quarter. To take my hat and go with 
him to the miserable den where he 
lives, and explore the history of his 
case, and ascertain what his wants 
are, and institute a systematic remedy 
for his troubles which shall relieve 
them, not for to-day merely but for his 
whole life — that would be benevolence. 
It is a cheap commutation to give him 
a quarter and turn him off. 



2406. The Widow's Mites. — How 
little she thought what she was doing ! 
How little she thought how much she 
was enriching the world ! Two mites 
— one-tenth of a penny — she threw 
into the chest ; and she has made the 
world richer than all the tributes which 
were paid that year in Jerusalem, by 
her unconscious humility, and by her 
simple generosity and benevolence. 

It is still the same. We think those 
gifts most influential which have most 
of record ; but it is not so. I believe 
that the God who made this case so 
eminent, I believe that that ascended 
Christ who so emphasized this little 
history that it has been fruit-bearing 
for thousands of years, still adminis- 
ters in the same way. 

2407. Gifts of Love Lasting. — The 
widow's mite, that went tinkling 
through the brazen throat of the treas- 
ury is sounding yet ; the escaping fra- 
grance of the alabaster box fills the 
world with sweetness. 

2408. Better than Almsgiving. — If 
a man asks for a dollar at my door, 
and I put him into my garden and 
teach him to work there, and pay him 
a dollar a day for ten days, and send 
him away with ten dollars and some 
knowledge of floriculture, it is better 
for him than if I had sent him away 
with a dollar and nothing else. 

2409. How to Give. — Generosity 
was inculcated ; but it was not enough 
to be simply generous. " He that 
giveth, let him do it with simphcity ; " 
not pompously, not ostentatiously, not 
boastfully. Do not give, as many 
rich men do, hke a hen, that lays her 
^gS' ^""^ then cackles. 

2410. Habitual Generosity. — A 
habit of generosity is like oil on ma- 
chinery, and makes life run smoothly. 
And there is more in it to teach men 
to love their fellows than in all the 
preaching in the world. 



9«2 



RELIGIOUS LIFE 



241 1. Native Benevolence. — When 
they sought to lay the foundations of 
the Navy Yard dry-docks there were 
springs in the ground. These were 
small, to be sure, but men labored for 
months and months, with piles and con- 
crete, to hide down those springs. Still 
the brave little omnipotences lifted 
themselves up, and shattered and 
drove hither and thither whatever im- 



pediments presented themselves. At 
last it was found necessary to make a 
wall about them, and let them lift them- 
selves up. As there are springs that 
will flow, so there are hearts that have 
an impetus of benevolence and an in- 
tensity of desire that nothing can 
check. If there be no want that so- 
licits at the gate, they go out and so- 
licit at the gate of want. 



MISCELLANEOUS 



MISCELLANEOUS 



XLII. EDUCAriON AND LITERATURE 



2412. Individuality. — Men are like 
trees ; each one must put forth the 
leaf that is created in him. Education 
is only like good culture — it changes 
the size but not the sort. 

2413. Imperfect Men. — I remember 
standing by the side of Mr. Hicks, the 
artist, when he was preparing his 
colors. He put in one, and another 
and another, to get this tint and that, 
from the red and the yellow all the 
way down along the scale ; and as I 
looked on his palette it was all a blur 
of color, but as he looked upon it ever 
so many pictures were there. 

So in the hands of God the things 
that in human life seem to us to be 
mere broken, disconnected elements, 
not very nearly brought together, will 
be made perfect. In the imper- 
fect and rude beginnings of the hu- 
man soul he sees a complete and per- 
fect portrait that by and by is to shine 
out to the honor and glory of his name 
and to the exceeding great joy and re- 
joicing of myriads of souls. 

2414. Teachers and Preachers. — Is 
he that carved Moses' statue, is he 
that spanned the dome of St. Peter's, 
is he that knows how to make the mar- 
ble breathe, to be remembered as a 
son of genius through all the ages, and 
is not he to be counted worthy of 
thought who works, not in marble, nor 
in clay, nor in metal, but in the living 
souls of men ? That man who can 
take the poor, the despised, the 
blind, the passion-bound creature, and 
work out in him the Divine image, 
yet one day will rise higher by his 
work than any artist genius that ever 
lived and wrought upon the earth. 



For there is no material like human 
nature, and there is no dignity like 
working in it, and there is no grandeur 
like success in thus working. 

2415. The Teacher's Noble Work. 
— The older I grow, the more I feel 
that though a man's work in the school 
does not show immediately, though 
there is less ostentation and less pub- 
licity about it than about almost any 
other work, and though far less credit 
is given to teachers than those of any 
other profession, yet there is no place 
where a man's skill and integrity and 
knowledge take hold so immediately, 
where so Httle is lost and so much is in- 
vested at interest, and compound in- 
terest, as in the school. . . . The suc- 
cessful teacher who loves his work is a 
pubhc benefactor of no mean kind. I 
think the profession of teaching not 
only ought to have an honored place 
among the learned and liberal profes- 
sions, but ought to stand very near the 
top in the gradations of respect and 
honor. 

2416. Baby Possibilities. — It seems 
that Manoah's wife had a vision of 
angels, and it was repeated in dreams, 
concerning the birth of a child, which 
in those days, as in all times, was 
thought to be a blessing from the hand 
of God. The promise of children is 
divine, and to every noble nature the 
thought of bringing a child into hfe 
should be hke a visit and vision of 
angels from God's very throne. It is 
the dearest, the divinest, the deepest, 
and the purest experience of human 
hfe. The ministration of angels was 
not, however, in this case, so much to 
declare the coming birth as to declare 
that the child was to be a hero, and 



515 



5.6 



MISCELLANEOUS 



that it must be brought up with that 
thought in view. But is not every 
child a subject of angelic visitation ? 
Every mother's babe is perhaps capa- 
ble of becoming a hero ; yet it is not 
every mother that brings her child up 
as if he were so. 

2417. The Truth in Simphcity. — 
Suppose a mother, hearing the child 
cry and scared in the night, goes to 
the door and says, " Martha, behold, 
present, invisible to thyself, thy ma- 
ternal ancestor in the immediate suc- 
cession ascending," she would state 
the truth. Whether the child would 
understand it or not, that is the truth. 
What does the mother say ? " Hush ! 
hush! it is your mother." That set- 
tles the whole thing in a minute. 
"Your mother," and that carries a 
whole encyclopedia to the child's un- 
derstanding. 

2418. Naturally Good Children. — If 
your children are easy to bring up, 
you need not fret lest they will be 
mere moralists. Many people are 
concerned because their children are 
sweet, loving, and compliant, so that 
they cannot get an awful religious ex- 
perience out of them. It is as if the 
bass viol should mourn because it can- 
not do what the flute does. It is as if 
the bass should complain because it is 
not like the tenor ; the tenor because 
it is not like the contralto ; and the 
contralto because it is not Hke the so- 
prano. . . . Your children are sus- 
ceptible of different degrees of educa- 
tion. They begin at different points 
in relation to moral perfection — some 
far away, and some much nearer ; and 
that, according to the great principle 
of heredity, as shown in the Old Tes- 
tament. Every one must take his 
children where he finds them, and 
bring them up as best he can. 

2419. Educational Taxation Wise. 
— The wisest expenditure a State can 



make is for the support of common 
schools. For, every time you educate 
a child, you stop up a hole at the bot- 
tom of the ship of the Commonwealth. 

2420. The Common Schools. — 
Make such provision for the education 
of the commonest people, that the 
richest uncommon people will ask for 
their children the privilege of partici- 
pating in the advantages of the com- 
mon school. And keep it common. 
Bring everybody to it, and let them 
there learn each other's brotherhood. 
And thus society, beginning and pass- 
ing through the common school, will 
form sympathetic associations which 
will go on unfolding themselves after- 
wards, and which will no more be for- 
gotten by man than the wide-spreading 
branches of a tree forget the roots 
from which all their magnificence 
draws sustenance. 

2421. Comradeship in the Public 
Schools. — The common school must 
be studiously employed to build up, 
not simply light and knowledge, but 
that sympathy between men which 
comes from their minghng together in 
the same sphere of life. I remember 
that the year I came to Brooklyn, I 
found in one of the churches a man 
who had been a boy alongside of me 
in old Litchfield. We had gone to 
the unpainted brown schoolhouse to- 
gether. We had secretly whittled the 
benches together. We had together 
caught flies instead of ideas. We had 
played together. We had scuffled to- 
gether. We had whipped each other 
— taking turns from day to day. And 
so we had grown up, he the child of 
an almost outcast shoemaker, and I 
the child of Dr. Beecher. I had not 
met him for thirty years, but no sooner 
did he mention his name than my 
blood tingled, and we grasped hands 
as if we had had the same mother. 
It was because we had sat on the same 



EDUCATION AND LITERATURE 



517 



bench in the common school, and had 
played together, when boys, although 
our parentage and our conditions in 
society were far apart — things which 
boys know but little about. And I 
think we cannot overestimate that 
sympathy which comes from the ming- 
ling of the high and the low, the rich 
and the poor, the strong and the 
weak. The common school lays the 
foundation among boys for a knowl- 
edge of each other, a confidence in 
each other, and a sympathy with each 
other, which will not wear out during 
their whole life. 

2422. Democracy of the Public 
School. — The common school is dem- 
ocratic, because it is bringing back to 
a common level again the irregulari- 
ties produced by active life. Knowl- 
edge, riches, skill, create classes, and 
so inequalities. If, in the spring, you 
should look along a level cultivated 
field where corn grew the previous 
year, you would see ridges that re- 
main. Now comes the plow to turn 
over the soil, and all the old hillocks 
go down, and lie level again for the 
next crop. The common school is the 
plow that levels each generation of 
human life. All the children, without 
regard to superiorities or excellencies 
of parentage, have to come together 
and stand on a common dead-level in 
the schoolhouse. . . . There is a 
public sentiment of the school which 
is just as real, and as vital, and as 
despotic even, as the public sentiment 
of the great community ; and it is a 
good thing to bring down to the origi- 
nal starting point all the elevations 
and inequalities which the various 
forces of active life produce, and to 
say to all the boys, " Your feet must 
stand on one level : now shoot your 
heads as high as you please ! " 

2423. Self-Education. — Many men 
are said to be self-taught. No man 



was ever taught in any other way. 
Do you suppose a man is a bucket to 
be hung on the well of knowledge and 
pumped full? Man is a creature that 
learns by the exertion of his own fac- 
ulties. No matter how many aids a 
man may be surrounded by, after all, 
the learning is that which he himself 
acquires. And whether he is in col- 
lege or out of college, in school or out 
of school, every man must educate 
himself. 

2424. Learning Liberty. — My Amer- 
ican notion of political economy would 
work freedom out of this : You must 
make the poor intelligent. It will not 
do to give the suffrage to ignorance 
and brutality, and still less to keep it 
away from them. The dangerous 
citizen is the man without responsibil- 
ity. The way to teach a man to vote 
is to let him vote. The way to teach 
a man archery is to let him shoot ; to 
look at a match will never teach him 
to shoot. 

2425. Worthlessness of Ignorance. 
— An uneducated mind is like undug 
ore. Iron on my farm is nothing. 
When I have dug it out, and smelted 
it, and purified it, and when it has 
been made into a sword, into knives, 
into utensils or machinery of any sort, 
then the mineral has been educated. 
The first step in education of men con- 
sists in digging them out in the rough, 
preparatory to bringing them to their 
perfect form. 

2426. Helplessness of the Unedu- 
cated. — There are walking-sticks that 
are made for seats as well. When 
they are shut up, they are like walk- 
ing-sticks, and they cannot stand of 
themselves ; but if you open them, 
there sprout out legs, that enable them 
not only to stand, but to support a 
man's weight. An uneducated man 
is like an unopened walking-stick of 
this kind. He cannot stand alone. 



5.8 



MISCELLANEOUS 



He needs to lean on some king or 
government. It is not until he has 
been taken and developed and ex- 
panded that he can hold himself up. 
And it is this idea of developing that 
which God has put in every man, so 
that he can stand alone, that is the 
foundation of self-government, — the 
only divinely instituted government in 
this world, 

2427. Self-Government the Ideal. — 
All government in the family, all 
methods of civil government, all insti- 
tutions of education and religion, ought 
to set this ideal before themselves. I 
have sometimes heard people say, 
" How poorly those boys have turned 
out! It is strange, too, because there 
never were boys more strictly brought 
up. To my certain knowledge, they 
used to be whipped once a week!" 
Yes, they were watched ; they were 
kept out of evil ; they were carefully 
instructed ; and when they were of 
age, and went out of the family, they 
plunged into every liberty and every 
license, and proved themselves fallible 
and imperfect in every way. They 
learned a great many things in the 
family, but they never learned how to 
govern themselves. There are a great 
many fathers and mothers whose na- 
ture is to govern. They govern their 
children not to teach those children to 
govern themselves, but for the sake of 
governing them ; and the children 
never learn self-government. But the 
object of governing a child is to get 
rid of the necessity of governing him. 

2428. Knowledge and Intelligence. 
— Knowledge is that which a man 
knows. Intelligence is that which 
knows it. Knowledge bears the same 
relation to intelligence that invested 
wealth does to that spirit of enterprise 
which creates wealth. One is the 
active cause ; the other is the product 
or effect of that cause. Mere knowl- 



edge will not save men. Intelligence 
is a preservative force. 

2429. The Cure of Ignorance. — It is 
a great loss to a man to have had a 
head put on him with nothing in it, 
and next to that it is a great misfortune 
to a man to have had a good deal put 
into his head and not know it is there. 
It is a curse to an ignorant man to be 
ignorant. Eyes he has, but he cannot 
see the length of his hand ; ears he 
has, and all the finest sounds in cre- 
ation escape him ; a tongue he has, 
but it is cursed with blundering. An 
ignorant man is one whom God packed 
up and men have not yet unfolded. 
If a man has as a mechanic a chest of 
tools and knows how to use a gimlet 
and a saw, and that is all, it is a great 
deprivation to him ; he cannot keep up 
in the race of life ; and an ignorant 
man must of necessity be dropping 
down, down to the bottom. 

2430. Man's Possibilities. — When a 
man is first born, he is like an acorn. 
But in an acorn — that is, in its possible 
future — there is timber. In a bushel 
of acorns there are ships, there are 
dwellings, there are curiously carved 
cornices and statues. And when men 
are born, they are born into philoso- 
phers, into statesmen, into orators, into 
patriots, into wise men, — provided 
that, being born, they are planted, and 
developed, and given an opportunity 
to grow to that which God thought of 
when he created them. But the belief 
of the human race has been that 
knowledge was dangerous for the 
common people. 

2431. Getting Knowledge Brings 
Wisdom. — Men say, " It would be 
better if knowledge had been given to 
us outright." Why should one send 
his apprentice into the forge to find 
the instruments he is to make all ready 
for his hand ? If they are made and 
left there for him, when will he learn 



EDUCATION AND LITERATURE 



519 



his trade ? If he is left there and 
works it out by himself, his blunders 
are his schoolmasters. They teach him 
how to do, and when he has learned 
his trade his trade has developed him. 

2432. Transgression as Education. 
— Did God make laws to have them 
broken ? In one sense, no ; but in an- 
other sense, yes. Yes, when he put 
nascent, germinating creatures under 
them ; for he knew perfectly well that 
they would break those laws. Every 
step upward was a step that had to be 
accomplished by endeavor. You set 
a copy for your boy to write in school ; 
a beautiful copy it is ; but you know 
perfectly well that he will make 
sprawling letters, and mar every 
single line. Did you set that copy to 
have that child make such sprawhng 
letters ? Did you not know he would 
make them? Certainly you did. 
You set the copy that he might find 
his way up to it by long-continued 
effort. 

2433. Scholastic Prejudice. — " How 
knoweth this man letters [religious 
literature], never having learned?" 
Certainly Jesus had not been educated 
in the school of the Rabbi ! The 
Jewish school-men would not accept 
the best wheat unless it grew upon the 
right kind of straw. Just such slaves 
of routine and regularity still exist ; 
the poorest of fruit growing upon the 
grafted tree is by them accounted bet- 
ter than the noblest fruit growing upon 
its own natural root. But he who can 
speak important truth is educated. 
Education is but the pickaxe which 
digs out the gold, and the gold cares 
not when once coined by what instru- 
ment it came to the light. Yet in 
every age spiritual pedantry demands 
that gold should be stamped with the 
image and superscription of a school 
or a sect, or else be accounted base 
metal. 



2434' Quick Learning. — Sudden 
learning is superficial gilding ; learn- 
ing that is deep-seated comes with 
long-breathed, long-paced industry. 

2435' Books. — Books are the win- 
dows through which the soul looks 
out. A house without books is Uke a 
room without windows. 

2436. Ministry of Books. — A book 
is a garden. A book is an orchard. 
A book is a storehouse. It is good 
company. It is a counselor. It is 
a multitude of counselors. The best 
things that the best men have ever 
thought in past times, and expressed 
in the best manner, lie in books ; and 
he who knows how to use these may 
be said, almost, to have control of the 
world. I would give more for the 
ownership of books than for that of all 
the gold in California, if in ownership 
I sought happiness — various, self-re- 
specting happiness, continuous amidst 
cares, and burdens, and disappoint- 
ments in youth, in middle age, and in 
old age. There is nothing like a book 
to one who knows how to pluck fruit 
from it, and how to prepare it for his 
palate. 

2437. Power of Greatness. — If a 
man is great he prepares the way for 
twenty men, each of whom is perhaps 
not equal to him, but the twenty to- 
gether are five times as great as he 
was. He distributes himself, and is 
buried, and lives again in the tenden- 
cies which he has educated. 

2438. Greatness of Great Minds. — 
Not once in an age, not once in a hun- 
dred ages, is there a Paul. But such 
great natures disperse their powers in 
others, and live on. Not another 
Shakespeare ; but, by reason of his 
having lived, a hundred poets have 
sung who would not have been in- 
spired otherwise. Not a great many 
Bacons ; but there have been whole 
schools of philosophers and investigat- 



520 



MISCELLANEOUS 



ing men because Bacon's genius was 
distributed, and it stimulated them, 
and brought them out. From one 
great man, raised up by God to mould 
the age and to expand before the im- 
agination and the reason of men a 
larger manhood, and to make it possi- 
ble, hundreds, sometimes thousands, 
take a conception and verify it in a 
better life. He is lifted up ; and there 
will be a thousand greater than they 
ever would have been but for him. 

2439. Direct and Indirect Influence. 
— The intensity of influence on others 
is rendered much greater by personal 
presence, but its duration and potency 
seem rather to depend upon instru- 
mentality than personality. A great 
nature may influence you ; but it is 
not probable that Raphael ever did 
influence men with his personal pres- 
ence while he lived as he has since 
with his pictures, nor is it probable 
that Bacon's influence while he was 
alive was so great as it had been since 
his death. Moses was a natural legis- 
lator and leader ; and yet his influ- 
ence by his statutes and institutes has 
been far greater than the power which 
he exerted when he was yet alive. 
Socrates had a certain influence ; he 
stirred Athens as a spoon stirs the con- 
tents of a goblet : but Socrates would 
have lived almost none at all if he had 
not had his subsequent life through 
the Platonic writings. Though Jesus 
while on earth was influential, his in- 
fluence was circumscribed ; but 
through books, laws, and institutions 
his personal influence has been car- 
ried on through nearly two thousand 
years, and will go on to the end of the 
world, augmenting. 

While, then, you stand in the pres- 
ence of a living being, and feel the 
throb of his heart, you feel his per- 
sonal influence more intensely ; but 
for breadth, variety and extent, its 



spread through other instrumentalities 
is more potent. 

2440. Self-measurement Upwards. 
No man who looks down for his meas- 
ure will rise. Are you a poet ? Then 
do not read poetasters and say, " I 
write better poems than they do, and 
therefore I am a better poet." Read 
Milton ; read Shakespeare ; read 
Homer ; go to the old Englishmen of 
immortal thought, whose drums and 
trumpets have sounded clear down 
through the ages to this day ; go to 
the grandest and noblest of our think- 
ers and writers ; sit in council with 
them ; and then see if you are not a 
dwarf — a pigmy. It will make you 
humble to have high ideals. But a 
man who forever measures himself by 
pigmies and dwarfs, and thinks he is 
better than they — what is he but a 
mountebank among pigmies and 
dwarfs ? 

2441. Life Interprets Language. — 
It is said that words express what they 
represent. No, words do not express 
anything. We might spell them 
backward, and it would be all the 
same, if we had always spelled them 
backward. The words are nothing. 
They are dead. The thing which 
they express must be a living thing in 
your consciousness at present, or in 
your memory of the past. 

Take the word joy. How many ex- 
periences there are in connection with 
joy ! How strange are the forms 
which it assumes ! How complex it 
is ! How infinitely various ! It is like 
the windings of a band of music where 
there are a hundred instruments. 
And yet, to represent this, you have 
only this simple word Joy, which is 
but a mere hint. You contain in 
yourself the definition. It is the mem- 
ory of your own experience. It is the 
glitter of ten thousand influences that 
interprets it. 



EDUCATION AND LITERATURE 



521 



2442. Speaking and Thinking. — 
Words are but the bannerets of a 
great army ; thoughts are the main 
body as it moves. Words show here 
and there a gleam in the air, but the 
great multitude of thoughts march un- 
seen below. 

2443. Power of Good Phrasing. — 
If a proverb is true, it is of incalcula- 
ble service. It lives through genera- 
tions. It needs no settlement, no sti- 
pend, no pulpit. It goes everywhere, 
preaching to everybody for nothing. 
But if a proverb is bad, it is equally 
influential, just as enduring, and no 
less ubiquitous. Thus a selfish thing, 
shrewdly expressed, will cultivate self- 
ishness for centuries. A bit of sinister 
wisdom, wittily phrased, will inoculate 
a whole nation with a malignant influ- 
ence. 

2444. Nimbleness of Proverbs. — 
These proverbs — you cannot hunt them 
easily. They fire and run. They are 
everywhere, and they are nowhere. 
You turn out your great argument to 
hunt a proverb, and the proverb is 
gone before you can bring your argu- 
ment to bear upon it. It is like a park 
of artillery used to hunt mosquitoes. 
The mosquitoes dodge here and there 
in the air, and all of them escape. 
And when you hunt proverbs, they 
elude your grasp, and go where they 
please, carrying good, bad, or indiffer- 
ent matter, according to their nature. 

Nevertheless, if they are evil, their 
mischievousness requires that they 
should not be let alone. And so, now 
and then, a proverb which touches 
vital and distinctive truth with malice 
should be taken up, and like a venom- 
ous insect be pinned to the wall. 

2445. Novel-Reading. — There are 
fifty novels taken out from our public 
libraries where there is one solid 
and substantial work drawn. I have 
not a word to say against novels. I 



believe in them. I think that if they 
are good they are useful. I believe 
that they are no more to be disallowed 
than any other part of literature. 
They can be made to serve the very 
best ends of economy, of virtue and 
morality, to say nothing of religion ; 
but a man who feeds on nothing but 
these — how miserable and wretched he 
is! These are the whip-syllabubs of 
life. They are not the bread nor the 
meat. But ought a man to sit down 
and eat for his dinner nothing but 
sugar-plums ? 

2446. Fact and Fiction. — In these 
days, when there is so much magazine 
writing and when there are such good 
novels, we are liable to overindulge in 
light reading — for novels and maga- 
zine-writing are to solid matter what 
liquid food is to solid food. A little 
soup is very good ; but soup all the 
time is not so good. Many people 
solace themselves with the thought 
that there is philosophy, history, hu- 
manity and reformation in novels ; but 
it is worth their while now and then to 
listen to fact as well as to fiction. 

2447. Fiction a Condiment. — Use 
fiction as you would spices in your 
diet. No man takes a quart of cloves, 
nor exhausts the cruet at a single 
meal. 

2448. Cr3rptic Parables of Jesus. — 
He likewise taught by pictures ; for 
such are his exquisite little fables, as 
the Greeks would have called them, 
and which we style parables. But 
Jesus explicitly declared to his disci- 
ples, that, for wise purposes, he often 
employed an outward form to hide 
within it a meaning which they were 
not yet prepared to accept. The out- 
ward form, therefore, acted the part 
of the lobes of a seed. They first pre- 
serve the germ till planting time, and 
then supply its food until it has roots 
of its own. 



522 



MISCELLANEOUS 



2449. Reading with Discrimination. 
— A man docs not think it necessary 
to cat a whole ox piece by piece. He 
takes the tenderloin, and leaves the 
rest ; that suffices for him. Now, 
books have a tenderloin ; and if you 
get at it you get all that those books 
have for you — that is, if you are read- 
ing for general information. 

2450. Sympathetic Moods for Read- 
ing. — It is not for everybody, nor for 
anybody at all times, to read the Book 
of Ruth. You cannot prepare to read 
it with your dictionary and your com- 
mentary. There are some strains of 
poetry which a man can read only 
when, in the mutations of feeling, he 
comes around to the very point of feel- 
ing from which those poems came. A 
man in the heyday of joy and hilarity 
cannot read the "In Memoriam " of 
Tennyson. A man cast into profound 
grief cannot enter into some of the 
most exquisite poems of joy and fan- 
tasy. The Book of Ruth should be 
read when the world has subsided from 
about us. 

2451. Noble Poesy Immortal. — 
Those who have the gift of embodying 
moral truths and noble experiences 
(which are the best truths that ever 
dawn on the world) in verse ; those 
who have the power to give their 
higher thoughts and feelings the wings 
of poetry — they, being dead, speak 
far back. We hear Homer chanting 
yet, and chanting the best things that 
men knew in his day. And the world 
is still willing to listen to the oldest 
poet. Going further back, in the 
majestic numbers of the Hebrew Tes- 
tament we find the most sublime truths 
of God and of destiny in poetic forms ; 
and the world is never weary of listen- 
ing to them. They reappear in every 
form of translation. They are as fresh 
to-day as they were on the day they 
were uttered. And since that time, in 



every nation, bards have sprung up. 
The voice of men who speak for love 
and purity and immortality, grows 
sweeter and clearer with time. And 
he who has had permission to write 
one genuine hymn, to send forth one 
noble sonnet, to sing one stately epic, 
may well fold his wings and his hands, 
and say, " Now let thy servant depart 
in peace." 

2452. " Whatsoever Things Are 
Pure." — To-day, there is a school that 
has sprung up from the loins of Greece. 
Infidelity, crossed upon paganism, has 
bred a school of authors who delight 
to dabble, if not in the midst yet upon 
the edge of the Styx ; and their poems 
seem like bubbles of mephitic gas that 
come up from the mud beneath. They 
linger for a moment in outwai'd beauty, 
and then go out in stench. 

If the spirit is to be set free from the 
entanglements of the flesh, then what- 
ever in food, whatever in drink, what- 
ever in intercourse, tarnishes pure 
thought, obscures the vision, and 
draws men down from spiritual joy 
towards the animal, whatever sullies 
the intellect in literature, whatever by 
wit or in any other way distempers the 
purity of the loving heart by salacious 
thought — these are all frowned upon 
by the spirit of Christ ; and whatso- 
ever things are pure in private thought 
and feeling, in personal conduct, 
Christianity demands. 

2453. The World's Bulletin.— The 
drayman, at his nooning, divides the 
time between his little tin kettle and 
his newspaper. A man, though he 
goes home tired, yet must know what 
is the news. The vast majority of 
laboring men — not to speak of pro- 
fessional men, and men whose busi- 
ness requires that they shall read — 
know before the setting of the sun, on 
any given day, what is being done in 
Asia, in Turkey, in Cahfornia, what is 



EDUCATION AND LITERATURE 



523 



being done the world around — for this 
is a pocket-world now, when every 
man can carry it round for himself, in 
his newspaper. 

2454. The Newspaper. — For us, the 
newspaper is a greater treasure than 
uncounted millions of gold. If a man 
be worth his millions, he is all the 
more dangerous if he be ignorant. 
No nation can bear wealth that is not 
intelligent first. The newspaper is 
every year increasing in circulation ; 
and as it increases in circulation, it 
increases in importance, not only as a 
moral power, but as a political power 
allied to morahty, to a degree that 
most who conduct it do not suspect. 
Newspapers are to the body politic 
what arteries are to the human body, 
their function being to carry blood and 
sustenance and repair to every part of 
the body. Multiply them, and give 
them wider circulation ! Would to 
God that those who conduct them 
might realize the full measure of their 
responsibility. 

2455. The Ignorance of Science. — 
When Science lifts up its head and 
pretends that it is going to displace 
Christianity and the Church, and bring 
in an era of truth, it has not learned 
yet that scientific truth is Christian 
truth. Christ, in the spirit that he 
gives to his people, declares through 
Paul : "Whatever is true — that is to 
be included." 

2456. Humanization of Literature. 
— As late as the day of Cowper, Eng- 
lish literature, from its day-dawn down 
through Dryden and Pope, and all 
that class of poets, was one that stung 
the under-classes with a perpetual 
contempt. Nothing was more des- 
picable than this paganism of English 
literature, to the days of its deliver- 
ance at the hands of such poets as 



Cowper and Wordsworth, and the 
whole modern school. The deliver- 
ance of English literature is within our 
own memory. But a great revolution 
has taken place. Even the literature 
of France, not alone in its higher 
branches, but even in its infamous 
depths, has received this touch of hu- 
man sympathy ; and now it works for 
the poor, for the unfriended, for the 
neglected classes. It must be said 
that the reigning ideas in philosophy 
and in hterature to-day are in behalf 
of the despised classes, which a cen- 
tury ago had no recognition and no 
standing before the judgment of man- 
kind. The bottom is coming up and 
the top is going down to meet it, not 
for the sake of losing its power, but 
because the valleys shall be exalted 
and the mountains brought down in 
the day when the Lord's highway shall 
be cast up. 

2457. Wickedness of Selfish Cul- 
ture. — It is wicked for a man who is 
blessed of God with great intellectual 
power, and who is born to a station in 
which he can command his support 
without labor, to shut himself up in a 
library, and be a student, and devour 
books for eighty years, even though 
he may never injure a fellow-creature. 
To gormandize books is as wicked as 
to gormandize food. You have no 
more right to be a literary epicure 
than to be a physical epicure. And 
if a man makes his only aim in life 
scholarship, and lives merely for his 
own mental gratification, he is a crim- 
inal. If a man follows art simply for 
his own pleasure, he cannot justify 
himself by saying, " I never injured a 
fly." That is not the question. Did 
you ever benefit a fly ? With all your 
powers and opportunities, what have 
you done for the good of others? 



5^4 



MISCELLANEOUS 



XLIIL THE HUMAN RACE 



2458. The Hope for Humanity. — As 
the traveler on earth has a double 
journey ; as in addition to the journey 
which he is himself making, he is swept 
along by the earth in its revolutions ; 
so I beheve that not only the individ- 
ual but the human race is being swept 
in vast aerial circles towards better 
climes and nobler societies. What- 
ever may be done by tears, by sor- 
rows, by temptations, by weariness, 
by study, by toil, there is something 
better than all that. The irresistible 
power of God is carrying the universe 
upward and onward to its final perfec- 
tion and glorification. 

2459. The Saving Spiritual Ele- 
ment. — Who would ever think, on 
opening the ground, and seeing the 
black dirt and manure, and casting 
the seed into it, that out of such filth 
there would come the fair stem and 
the pure, clean, white blossom, so 
fragrant and so beautiful ! And who, 
looking back into those pest holes of 
antiquity, so feculent with the deprav- 
ity of the human passions, would sup- 
pose could come from them the glori- 
ous fruits of faith in God ! Yet, in 
that matchless picture gallery, the 
eleventh of Hebrews, among the he- 
roes held up to view are Rahab, the 
harlot, Barak, the general, Gideon, 
Jephthah, and Samson, and such as 
they, who were, after all, brought up 
in households of idolatry, and sur- 
rounded by all that was impure, but 
who believed in an invisible God. 
They had that saving quality which 
can come from nothing but the spirit- 
ual element. 

2460. Human Development. — When 
the child is hungry, and the mother 
has no bread, she has to knead the 
flour, and the child cries, "Give me 
bread." The mother says, "It is not 



ready yet" ; she must bake it ; and 
the child still cries, " Give me bread." 
All these steps are necessary ; and we 
cannot omit any of them, and immedi- 
ately have the food. 

I tell you, this world is a big trough, 
and God is kneading a very large 
batch ; and when it has gone through 
the preparatory forms, and is finished, 
he will give it to us. We shall know 
it then. 

2461. Transition Periods. — The 
transition from worse to better, from 
lower to higher, is always indirect, 
like the track of the Israelites towards 
the promised land, there being a des- 
ert between. 

2462. Progress. — Truths are first 
clouds, then rain, then harvests and 
food. The philosophy of one century 
is the common sense of the next. Men 
are called fools, in one age, for not 
knowing what they were called fools 
for averring in the age before. We 
should so live and labor in our time 
that what came to us as seed may go 
to the next generation as blossom, and 
that what came to us as blossom may 
go to them as fruit. This is what we 
mean by progress. 

2463. Slow Growth of Christ's Peace. 
— Look at the great mixed Roman em- 
pire, with lordly wealth and squalid 
poverty, with crowned princes and ab- 
ject slaves, with degraded soldiers and 
downtrodden husbandmen. But re- 
member yet that through that air was 
breathed, amidst the sound of trum- 
pets, sweeter than any lute that was 
ever heard by men, a voice saying, 
" Good will ! " 

Where is Rome? Where are the 
glittering Cassars ? Hush the tocsin ; 
sound no more the trumpet ; for good 
WILL is proclaimed. But the roar 
went on, the cries ascended, and the 



THE HUMAN RACE 



S^S 



whole creation groaned in pain then, 
as it has until now. Yet the procla- 
mation was, " Peace, good will to 
men." 

2464. Men Must be Bom Better. — 
The final age, the perfect age, must 
be made up of men that come into life 
better than the generations do to-day. 
Men do not have a fair chance. A 
man who is born with robust health 
has a better chance than the man who 
is born an invalid for his fath- 
er's sins. But do you not believe 
that in the coming time there is to be 
such knowledge of heredity as shall 
lead men to wiser selections, and that 
the world which has learned how to 
breed sheep for better wool, horses for 
better speed, and oxen for better beef, 
will not by and by have it dawn on 
their minds that it is worth while to 
breed better men too, and to give 
them the chance that comes from vir- 
tuous parentage on both sides? As 
goods well-bought are half-sold, so 
men well-born are half-converted. 
There is going to be a vast change on 
this subject. 

2465. Lower Law a Step Towards 
Higher Law. — A fine handwriting is 
eminently desirable in itself ; but in the 
mind of every intelligent teacher it is 
simply something on the way to that 
which is better. What the boy writes, 
or is going to be able to write, is more 
important than that his handwriting 
should be good. 

Now, obedience to physical law, and 
social law, and civil law, and indus- 
trial law, is important in these respect- 
ive spheres ; but only an initial proc- 
ess leading to something higher — 
namely, the development of the whole 
manhood in man. 

2466. Development in Material Life. 
— Christianity includes every develop- 
ment of man. I suppose there was a 
time when a wheel-barrow was 



counted an extravagance. It is not 
so now. A man was once called to 
disciphne in a town in Connecticut for 
riding to church in a wagon. He was 
the first man there that had a wagon. 
Things have changed since then. And 
there is to be a time when refinement, 
and education, and all manner of 
wealth, will so lift men in masses that 
what are now called luxuries will be 
considered necessaries of fife. 

2467. Interplay of Humanity. — As 
there is a drawing of vapor from the 
sea, and a changing of it in the air 
from its invisible form to rain, and a 
plunging down of it in the storm, and 
its reascension and continuous se- 
quence completing the round in nature, 
so it is with the forces of men ; so it is 
with their undertaking ; so it is with 
all things that belong to them. 

2468. The Good Time Coming. — 
When the nut goes into the ground 
in autumn it cannot let out the root, 
and the frost bites it, and bites it, until, 
by spring, the shell gives way, and the 
hickory finds out how to throw down 
its roots, and how to throw up its stem. 
God is planting the seeds of salvation 
everywhere, and they are coming up, 
and the harvest waves, in the angelic 
sight. If we had prophetic vision we 
could see it. On every side of society 
I sec fife and fertility, — promise of rich 
harvest. 

2469. The World's Growth. — Slow 
as it is, I believe the world is certainly 
advancing in excellence. Diffusion 
always seems slow. Plant a tree. The 
first year, how it shoots ! The second 
year, how it has grown ! In the third 
year it begins to branch, and whereas 
last year it may have gained fifteen or 
eighteen inches, we see now it has 
only gained about four inches. But it 
is branching, and the branches being 
taken together, it makes more than 
eight or twelve for the last year. As 



526 



MISCELLANEOUS 



it spreads wider and wider the growth 
of each particular httle stem is dimin- 
ished, but the growth of the whole 
tree is vastly augmented. So, in the 
human race, the diffusion of moral ex- 
cellence, a little here and a little there, 
but everywhere distributed, is an 
enormous growth when you take the 
whole realm and region of human life 
into account, though it may seem in 
any one particular spot to have been 
a very small development or accre- 
tion. 

2470. Infant Humanity in the Bible. 
— We permit in a child things which, 
if he were to continue them until he 
became grown, would deprive him of 
good standing and throw him out of 
society. And in the infancy of the 
race things were permitted which, 
judged by our modern standards of 
honor and right, would condemn a 
man as utterly base. They were bad 
then, and they would have been worse 
in every age since, by reason of the 
growing light that has been brought to 
bear upon truth and duty ; and yet 
they are narrated in the Word of God 
without a single protest. 

2471. Early Development Slow. — 
"The whole creation groaneth and 
travaileth in pain until now " — a vast 
struggle for extrication and ascent. 
It is impeded growth, ignorant growth ; 
but with all reactions there has been 
one continuous tendency ; and as the 
plant grows slowly under ground, 
dark, imperceptible, but faster when 
its stem reaches the light, and rapidly 
when it comes to the blossom and the 
fruit, so the earlier developments of 
humanity were the slowest. The more 
the world advanced, the more rapidly 
it could advance. 

2472. The Wasting of Men. — It is 
enough to see the wastes of antiquity 
— the battered statues ; the toppled- 
down columns ; the fractured walls ; 



the ruins of the Parthenon. It is a sad 
experience, mingling both pain and 
gladness. But of all the destructions 
that have gone on in this world, and 
that are now going on every day in 
the great cities which are grinding and 
crushing out manhood, the destruction 
of men is the saddest. Men are as 
clusters in the vine-vat ; and the feet 
of temptation tread them down as the 
vintner's feet tread the clusters. And 
blood flows out as wine. 

2473. Dissensions of Humanity. — 
If in a great crowd assembled on some 
public occasion there should spring up 
a panic of alarm, and forthwith every 
person should commence rushing, 
dashing, overthrowing the weak, and 
treading down children, the whole 
great throng doing mischief upon each 
other, it would imperfectly represent 
what is going on all over the world. 
There is not a house where there are 
not frictions. There is not a neigh- 
borhood where there are not misunder- 
standings. I had almost said, there is 
not a church where there are not 
quarrels. From the very fountain of 
sanctity, wedded love, from that little 
imperial realm, the household, the em- 
pire of affection, we still hear the mur- 
mur, the outcry, or sometimes even 
the passionate voice of discord. 

2474. The Voyage of Life. — When 
shipmen go to sea, they have their 
ship built first, and then make their 
voyage. But if they were obliged to 
start out with their ship built so as to 
be but just above the waves, and were 
obliged to finish it during the voyage, 
they would be in the condition that 
we are in in this world. We are born 
half-built. We have to navigate the 
sea of life in an unfinished state. Our 
business is to construct our bark as we 
go along. 

2475. Erection of God's Kingdom. 
— You cannot build a great house so 



THE HUMAN RACE 



527 



quick as you can a small one. You 
cannot build a city so quick as you 
can a hut or a hovel. If God was go- 
ing to build his kingdom in one family, 
he miglit do it quickly ; but as he is to 
do it in all the families of every coun- 
try, the work is so vast that it cannot 
be done in a day, nor in a year, nor in 
a hundred years, nor in many rolling 
ages. It takes times to build things 
that are to be so well built and so 
glorious as God's kingdom will be 
when it is completed. And we are 
living in an age that resists this work 
of God — sometimes on purpose, and 
sometimes not knowing what it does. 

2476. This World's Work,— The 
world is not God's show-room, but his 
work-shop. It is not surprising that 
rudeness and dust and confusion 
should prevail here. If one should go 
to a watchmaker's, and look upon an 
exquisite watch, should know the reg- 
ularity of its pulsations, the exquisite 
framework and adjustment of every 
part, the completeness and finish of 
the whole instrument, would he be 
wise in saying, " The shop where this 
was made must be rarely clean and 
exquisitely adjusted " ? Let him go 
back and search for its beginnings ; 
let him see the iron ore coming to 
steel ; let him see the gold smelting ; 
let him listen to the clatter of ham- 
mers and files ; let him see th? con- 
fusion of much-used tools, — the fur- 
nace, the bellows, the vice, the anvil, 
— and learn that infinite apparent con- 
fusions may conspire together to the 
production of perfect symmetries. 
And when the watch is made, its regu- 
lation and its adjustment for perfect 
time-keeping are more difficult than 
the mere construction of its parts. 
Thrust into an oven, it was left to 
throb in high degrees of heat. Then, 
with sudden change, plunged into ice, 
it was demanded of it with equal beats 



to measure time in this opposite con- 
dition. Nor will the adjustment be 
complete and the regulation perfect, 
until the instrument bears itself sub- 
stantially even and ahke under all 
temperatures, in all positions, and in 
all conceivable 'circumstances. How 
simple and foohsh is he who, seeing 
the watch without having seen the 
shop, imagines that so much perfect- 
ness must needs imply regulated har- 
mony, cleanliness, beauty, in the in- 
strumentation ! The very idea of this 
life is that it is a place in which to pre- 
pare men for perfectness in the life to 
come. 

2477. Man in the Making. — In 
Switzerland, where they make watches, 
one man never makes a whole watch. 
The different parts are made by differ- 
ent men. One man makes hair- 
springs, another man mainsprings, 
another the various wheels, and an- 
other cases. Each man takes some 
separate part, and expends his skill in 
manufacturing that particular part. 
Each has a shop of his own in which 
he works. And if you should go to 
all these various shops, and take from 
each a part, when you had gone the 
round, would you have a watch? 
Human life in this world is just like 
the watch that you would have — a 
heap of unpohshed, unfitted parts, in- 
capable of keeping time. It is only 
when the various parts have been 
taken from the different shops, and 
finished, and put together, that it can 
keep time. And you never would 
suspect from seeing the elements, 
what the completed whole was to be. 
It is only when the various faculties 
of the human mind are brought to 
their final condition, and united into 
a harmonious whole, that it will be 
what God designed. 

2478. Man-Making Takes Time. — 
Look upon some building in process 



528 



MISCELLANEOUS 



of construction. All round about it 
are stones disconnected. The archi- 
tect knows for \\ hat they were cut, but 
you do not. Whether it is cornice or 
window cap, whether it is the top of 
this column or of that, you do not 
know. Vast timbers, in the framer's 
mind fitted for their places and brought 
together here, give to your eye no in- 
dication of their function or their posi- 
tion. ' They lie around in their several 
heaps. As the workmen hoist them 
to their places, some order seems to 
begin. Yet it doth not appear what 
the whole is to be ; nor will the beauty 
and fairness of the whole appear un- 
til it is completed. And what a build- 
ing is whose materials are gathered 
and gathered ready for construction, 
that is man in this world, — a creature 
whose parts are yet under the ham- 
mer. This virtue, that grace ; this 
self-denial, that restriction ; this cour- 
age, that patience ; this faith, that 
love ; this sentiment, that affection, — 
all these varied elements, touched now 
by one instrument, and now by an- 
other, form, little by little, but never 
shape into a whole in this world, that 
structure which is to rise into perfect- 
ness in the other life. 

2479. Invisible Growths of Good. — 
You would never know, by looking at 
a forest of maple trees, that they were 
manufacturing sugar ; but they are. 
If it freezes at night, and the sun 
shines bright in the day, the sap runs, 
and when the sap runs there is sugar, 
if you boil the sap down. 

So there are processes going on in 
humanity that do not at all by their 
exterior show what their real result is 
going to be. And a nation that has 
the church, the school, and the intel- 
ligent work of industry, has those ele- 
ments in it which will find the way to 
prosperity by adjustments through so- 
cial experiment. 



2480. Men Ready to be Helped. — 
You never know, till you reach 
them, how accessible men are ; and 
if, with an earnest desire to promote 
their eternal welfare, you seek to 
bring them to a knowledge of the 
truth, you shall find that outside of 
churches, and outside of ordinary in- 
lluences, by the mystery of provi- 
dence, as well as by the mystery of 
grace, God is working in the hearts of 
men, and preparing them to be gath- 
ered by us into his fold. 

It is said that at the battle of Sol- 
ferino, what with the fear of being 
crushed, what with the mortal fear of 
the barbarity of the French soldiers, 
of which they had heard, hundreds of 
wounded men crept out of the fields 
into ravines, and coppices, and thick- 
ets ; that after three days had been 
passed in searching for them, many 
were still lying unfound. 

There are hundreds of men hiding 
themselves in ravines, and coppices, 
and thickets, on the battlefield of life, 
who need medicament, healing, care, 
and consolation ; and if you were to 
go out searching for them, you would 
every day find men, here and there, 
crying out in their distress, and asking 
for sympathy and help. 

2481. The Loom of Time. — The 
events that are flying backward and 
forward in this world are God's shut- 
tles, that carry the thread out of which 
are to be woven the garments that we 
are to wear hereafter ; and blessed are 
they whose shuttle carries a thread 
which shall glow in garments of white 
evermore. 

2482. God's Work Continuous. — 
When men make a chain, they make 
the links separately, and join the sec- 
ond to the first, the third to the sec- 
ond, the fourth to the third, and so on 
till the chain is completed ; and it is 
good for nothing if any link is left out. 



THE HUMAN RACE 



529 



We are links of that chain which 
God is making. Here is a man that 
undertakes a good work in this world, 
and carries it forward a certain dis- 
tance, and then dies. But that work 
does not stop. Another man takes it 
up where he left it, and carries it for- 
ward still farther, and then he dies. 
Another man takes it up where he 
left it, and carries it forward farther 
yet. And so on, this one, and that 
one, and others that follow them, are 
links of an endless chain that shall 
reach to the very heaven. 

2483. March of Humanity. — God's 
hand, like a sign-board, is pointing to- 
wards the elevation of mankind, and 
saying, "This is the way, walk ye in 
it." The road is very muddy in some 
spots, and the march will be slow, but 
the progress will be in one way. 
Though it be like the march into sum- 
mer out of winter, self-government 
will at last be reached. 

2484. Man's Weakness. — Shall I 
refuse to take my plants because 
they come up but two leaves ? They 
were made to come up but two leaves. 
Shall I refuse to take them because 
they go through months of evolution 
before they come to blossom ? They 
were meant to do so. And shall God 
turn back from the work of care and 
kindness, from his faithfulness towards 
the human race, because the human 
race, in the earlier periods of their ex- 
istence, during the period of their 
growth, are inchoate, rude, full of vari- 
ous imbecilities ? 

2485. Humanity and the Gospel. — 
Does the sun shine on the orchard and 
despise the moss that gathers on the 
rock ? There is no great and there is 
no small before the coming of the sun. 
To the sun all things are small and all 
things are great, and they all alike re- 
ceive beneficent power from it. So, 
in the preaching of the Gospel it is the 



business of every preacher to preach to 
every man and to all men. Though 
he may be better adapted to reach 
some classes than others, yet he must 
make use of the instrumentation which 
is put in his hand ; and the spirit, the 
genius, the inspiration, is man; — not 
institution, not law, not system, not 
philosophy, not learning, but man. 

2486. Man's Chaotic Incomplete- 
ness. — I remember very well when 
this organ was built. We gave up the 
lecture-room to it. The materials of 
which it was constructed were scat- 
tered about in that room. Various 
stops, huge pipes and small lay in 
great confusion up and down through 
the room, in the midst of all manner 
of dust and litter. And if you had taken 
one who had never seen an organ, and 
shown him the various parts of this 
one, lying inchoate through the whole 
adjoining room, how little conception 
would he have formed of the instru- 
ment as it now stands, brought to or- 
der and regularity, tuned, and under 
a master hand ! Now, we are dis- 
persed. We are full of crookedness. 
We are stops and pipes not yet 
brought to order and regularity, and 
not yet tuned ; but we are being 
brought to order and regularity, and 
are being tuned. " We are sons of 
God, and it doth not yet appear what 
we shall be.*' 

2487. Forelooking. — As the leaf and 
stalk prophesy the blossom, and the 
blossom prophesies seed and fruit, so 
it may be that the Divine love to man 
prophesies something grander than we 
can now imagine. 

2488, Human Unity and Variety. — 
Though men say " Yes" to the same 
things, if you could look back and see 
that " Yes " on the sensorium ; if you 
could see the interior picture of which 
it is the outward expression, you would 
be convinced that men are capable of 



530 



MISCELLANEOUS 



being united generically, but that spe- 
cifically they are never just alike. 
The apple-tree, the quince-tree, the 
blackberry and the rose all belong to 
one botanical genus, or family ; but 
each one is separate and different from 
the others. Run them back from their 
specific differences, and you will find 
that they come nearer and nearer to 
generic unity. If you say " Patriot- 
ism," all men agree in a certain sense 
in regard to it ; but if you question 
each of them about his idea of patriot- 
ism you will find that their ideas 
change until you get down to the vul- 
gar impulse of the uneducated, bloody 
man, or until you rise from that to the 
self-sacrificing and illustrious concep- 
tion of the poet-patriot. Men vary 
endlessly in their impressions of pa- 
triotism, courage, faith, hope, and love. 

2489. Elevation Means Effort. — If 
you do not want to go upstairs you 
can always live on the ground floor ; 
but if you live higher up you have got 
to go upstairs ; and if the world is 
going upstairs it has got to work for it 
— to lift up its feet, and to carry itself 
up. Settle things as many men would 
wish, upon a sort of level prosperity 
and undisturbed tranquillity, and you 
will get torpidity. It is the running 
brook that is a healthy brook. It is the 
brook that won't run that is the 
swamp ; and the swamp is the mother 
of malaria ; and malaria is disease 
and death. 

2490. Temples of God in Humanity. 
— The earliest temples were built of 
rude stones, clumsily framed together. 
Gradually, in after times, these were 
polished, and the several parts devel- 
oped into beauty. And then, still 
later, came the Egyptian period ; and 
at last the Grecian age, when her im- 
mortal architects and sculptors, Ictinus 
and Phidias, combined the successive 
excellences of the past into a glorious 



symmetry, and placed the Parthenon 
upon the Acropolis, where from every 
side men saw the temple of their god- 
dess glowing in lines of beauty against 
the clear heaven for a background. 
And so men work out one quality and 
another trait, one excellence and an- 
other attribute, and Christianity at last 
gathers them all together, giving them 
fit conjunction and proportion, and 
places them against the background 
of the eternal world ! 

2491. The Larger View. — In brood- 
ing hours of darkness one takes a de- 
sponding view. When one sees what 
human nature is, even Christian hu- 
man nature, when one sees in the great 
conflict of temptation, in the collisions 
and strife of the outward world how 
little stamina there is, and how few men 
can stand up against temptation, he is 
almost discouraged. He feels as 
though men were whitewashed with 
Christianity and not transformed — 
changed essentially by it. But when 
I take a larger view of it, I see that 
this is a part of that gradual struggle 
which has been running on through 
thousands of years, and very likely 
will run on through thousands of years 
yet to come, till these animal elements 
will be finally purged out of it, and a 
larger intelligence, and a better, more 
transparent moral element shall reign, 
to the glory of God and the joy of the 
universe. 

2492. Man's Capacity for Growth. 
— Men are carried around now on 
earth in little pots, as it were ; but they 
will stand in the other life spreading 
abroad their branches beyond all 
measurable space ; and they are valu- 
able, not for what they show them- 
selves to be here, but for the capacity 
which they have in them, and for that 
which they are going to be. 

2493. Social Averages. — Society 
moves upon averages. It is not 



THE HUMAN RACE 



531 



enough for making society progressive, 
to develop the top of it. In the dairy 
it may be all very well to have the 
cream on the top, but it is very poor 
in society to have the thing repeated ; 
for society does not move by the force 
of its top — that influences some — but 
it is the average of the mass that either 
accelerates or retards the movements 
of society in advance. It is the hull 
and the freight, and not the sails alone, 
that determine the quickness of the 
voyage, and ignorance at the bottom 
of society over-weights society ; it is 
obliged to drag this vast bulk. 

2494. Popular Refinement. — In 
going to my little place in the country, 
I have often ridden past great tulip 
trees. I have noticed that those sturdy 
trees bear just such blossoms, and 
blossoms as full of beauty and fra- 
grance, as the tiny tulip-plant does ; 
and I have thought : "So may it be 
one day with sturdy labor. May ro- 
bust laborers ere long be covered over 
on their sides and tops, as those great 
stalwart trees are, with blossoms of 
beauty and refinement." 

2495. Brotherhood and Equality. — 
Grass is grass, and trees are trees ; 
and no amount of railing on the part 
of the one will make it equal to the 
other. No destruction of the top is 
going to lift up the bottom. . . . 
The brotherhood of man does not im- 
ply any notions of equality, either 
actual or possible. To the end of the 
world there will be gradations. 

2496. Value Measured by Brain- 
power. — Men are ranked according to 
the part of their brain which is the 
most productive. The grand blunder 
of the Commune and of the Interna- 
tional theories consists in the supposi- 
tion that men can be made to stand on 
the same level, whom God did not 
make of the same force ; and that all 
men can have precisely the same re- 



muneration, who do not contribute the 
same quantities to society ; and that 
the same values attach to manual work 
which attach to other work ; that the 
things which are produced by the bot- 
tom of the brain should bring as much 
as those which are produced by the 
top. A man shears sheep. There 
are five hundred men in his township 
who can do the same work. The 
wool, when once it is sheared, is sent 
to be manufactured — scoured, cleaned, 
dyed, spun. It is to be woven into a 
fabric ; but there are not five hundred 
men who can weave that wool into an 
exquisite piece of cloth. The man 
who can do it has something in him 
finer than the man who can simply 
shear the wool. Why is the man who 
weaves paid more than the man who 
shears ? It is occasioned by the differ- 
ence which there is between the part 
of the brain which one sells, and the 
part of the brain which the other sells. 
The man who sells work with but little 
thought in it gets a low price, and the 
man who sells work with a great deal 
of thought in it, and fine thought at 
that, gets a higher price. 

2497. Literal Human Equality Im- 
possible. — A man taking a watering- 
pot full of water into his garden, and 
pouring it down, and determining that 
he will make a Niagara of it, will suc- 
ceed just as quick as those who under- 
take to raise up the poor in thought, 
the poor in execution, the wasteful and 
squandering, and make them the 
equals of the frugal, the thoughtful, 
the large-minded. 

2498 . Folly of Equalizing Wages. — 
What if a man should act on the prin- 
ciple that all grains should be valued 
alike, not only, but that chaff should 
be reckoned in the same category ? It 
would be about as sensible as the at- 
tempt in the great labor-market to 
lump men together, and equalize 



532 



MISCELLANEOUS 



them, high and low, strong and weak, 
skilled and unskilled, and make them 
all alike, cutting down all natural 
processes of ranking. 

2499. Worth of Each in His Place. 
— God deals with us very differently. 
I have no doubt that on the other side 
we shall see that there is good reason 
why every one is what he is. When 
we evolve and come out we shall all 
be like flowers in a bouquet, which 
grow separately, and differ widely, 
but which, when put together skillfully, 
are of equal importance. The large 
ones are no better than the small ones. 
The fine, dust -like blossoms fill up 
their own place, and are as essential 
to the perfection of the whole as any 
others. 

2500. Significance of the Insignifi- 
cant. — Did you ever see a mosaic, a 
picture made of little stones which can 
be brought in by the bushel or the 
basket or the cart, and not one of them 
worth sixpence ? Take them up indi- 
vidually, and they are of no particular 
value or beauty ; but when the artist, 
upon the pliant background, uses one 
and another, and another, and another, 
and, having finished in darkness, 
withdraws the curtain, there shines out 
Raphael's resplendent Ascension of 
Christ ; it is made up of all these little 
insignificant bits of glass and stone. 
Here we are mere fragments ; but 
when, after death, we are put together 
by the hand of the artist, God, we 
shall find that though individually we 
amounted to very little, when we are 
taken collectively, and put into proper 
relations, the glory of the Lord will 
shine out of our individual smallness. 

2501. Weak Units Mighty in Com- 
bination. — What is a drop of water of 
itself? What can be more harmless? 
What is weaker? What is less potent 
for any effect? It is mist, invisible. 
It rises through the imperceptible paths 



of the air, and hangs unseen in the 
heavens, till the cold strikes it, and it 
congeals into clouds, and falls in the 
form of rain, perhaps upon the moun- 
tain's top, and is sucked up by the 
greedy earth. Still sinking through 
the earth, it reaches the line of the 
rocks, from whose sides it oozes out 
and trickles down, when, finding other 
drops as weak as itself, they unite their 
forces ; and the sum of the weakness 
of all these drops goes to make the 
rill ; which flows on, making music as 
it flows, until it meets counter streams. 
These, combined, form the river ; the 
river forms the estuary ; and the estu- 
aries the ocean itself. And now, when 
God has marshaled the sum of the 
weakness of myriad drops together, 
they lift the mightiest ship as if it were 
but a feather, and play with the winds 
as if they were mere instruments of 
sport. And yet, that very drop, which 
a man could bear upon the end of his 
finger, is there, and has its part and lot 
in the might of the whole vast, un- 
bounded sea. 

We in our singleness, in our indi- 
viduality, in our own selves, are 
weaker than a drop of water, and more 
unstable ; but as kept together by the 
mighty currents which God's provi- 
dences make, as gathered together in 
the great ocean of life, we attain, work- 
ing together with him, under the in- 
spiration of his Spirit, to a might that 
makes life not ignoble, but sublime. 

2502. Popular Intelligence. — The 
moment the sap begins to rise under 
the warmth of the spring's sun, that 
moment the tree begins to feel that it 
must do something. The bud wakes 
up, the leaves are getting ready, the 
very twigs themselves are empurpled 
and change color. Popular intelli- 
gence — the growth of knowledge of 
the common people, which is promoted 
by schools all over the world, by the 



THE HUMAN RACE 



533 



facility of books and literature, by the 
intercourse of man with man, through 
commerce, through war, through 
everything ; the development of the 
thought-power and will-power of the 
great mass of men at the bottom of 
society — this is the sap that is bringing 
spring and summer to the human 
race. 

2503. Silent Coming of Great 
Events. — The gravest events dawn 
with no more noise than the morning 
star makes in rising. All great devel- 
opments complete themselves in the 
world, and modestly wait in silence, 
praising themselves never, and an- 
nouncing themselves not at all. 

2504. Upward Progress of Human- 
ity. — Day and night, the tides are ris- 
ing along our shores, filling bay and 
estuary, silently for the most part, yet 
surely. The power that draws them 
resides afar off in the heavenly bodies, 
and is not seen nor noticed, but only 
inferred. All the goodness of men, 
their generous impulses, their loves 
and faiths and inspirations of purity, 
their zeal and enthusiasm in self-denial 
and devotion — that great human tide 
of goodness which is moving in upon 
the human heart — is derived from 
God, who, afar off, silent as the moon 
in summer nights, is drawing all men 
unto him. The rising of the waters 
towards the planets is by force : the 
rising of human affections is by influ- 
ence. Matter has no conscious part 
in its own motion. But though God 
efficiently quickens men, they work 
together with him responding to his 
influence, and are drawn towards him. 

In God's creation we find a steady 
progress from force towards voluntary 
life, from power towards persuasion, 
from coercion towards liberty. The 
lines of development in the human 
race are running steadily in these 
directions. 



2505. Dangers of Co-operative Capi- 
tal. — Many thought that when slavery 
was overthrown the devils had gone 
out of the nation. Nay, they only 
changed quarters, and as yet no steep 
place has been found down which the 
infernal brood has rushed to destruc- 
tion. Mammon, enthroned in privi- 
lege, is our danger and our despot. 
Capital may, if wisely used, overhang 
the land like beneficent clouds, drop- 
ping down bounty upon every leaf and 
blade that grows ; or, it may hang 
above us surcharged with lightning, 
and move like a destroying storm. 

2506. The Coming Day. — Suppose 
that when Moses divided the Red Sea, 
and brought the Israelites into the 
wilderness, some one had unrolled to 
him this fair republic, settled in ten 
thousand valleys, and on as many 
hills, from ocean to ocean, by an in- 
telligent and prosperous people. Sup- 
pose some one had unfolded to him 
the laws and institutions of this land, 
which are God-created, and shall en- 
dure because they are God-sustained. 
Suppose these things had been por- 
trayed to the magistrate of the desert, 
as he was making his first mark. Do 
you think that even Moses could have 
believed them possible ? He could 
not. 

And now, when for nearly four 
thousand years since Moses the world 
has been growing and growing in 
every direction, when the material 
treasure of the world has been vastly 
augmented, and when the mental re- 
sources of the race have been very 
much developed, it seems impossible 
to imagine a time in the distant future, 
not when there will be a general aver- 
age intelligence merely, but when 
every person will have such strength, 
such purity, such volume and vastness 
of nature, that he can rely upon his 
own integrity ; that he can stand on 



534 



MISCELLANEOUS 



his own root ; tliat he can take care 
of himself. But such a time is coming. 

2507. The Ages to Come. — If fifty 
men in Bedlam, each having a sepa- 
rate instrument of music, should play 
on that instrument, each in his own 
way, and without any reference to the 
others, who, going by, could form any 
idea of what would come from those 
instruments if every one of these men, 
having got back to his reason, was 
playing in perfect harmony and in a 
sweet concord ? The hideous cacoph- 
ony, the din and the jar, of such a 
Bedlamite band — would it not be very 
much hke the play of our affections 
and feelings — sweet instruments, but 
played in horrible dissonance ? And 
what shall that state be in which God 
shall make the whole of them to be 
united sympathetically, and all of 
them played together in harmony — 
every power, every emotion, every 
instinct of love, sweetened, deepened, 
broadened, inspired, rendered divine 
by the presence of God ? But this is 
for " the ages to come." 

2508. The World's Long Growth. — 
The world is nothing but a great com- 
plex seed ; and that it is growing and 
developing, that it is to go through 
periods that are not days, nor one 
summer, but ages in the vast period of 
time, and that it shall at last come to 
its blossoming period, is no more sur- 
prising than that a plant should go 
through all its periods, and come to its 
blossoming period. 

The seed runs through its organic 
periods of development in a single 
summer ; but even in the vegetable 
kingdom, time becomes of vast im- 
portance. An acorn and a cone of 
pine, as we now know, carry centuries 
in them. There are cedars of Lebanon 
growing to-day, probably, which saw 
King Hiram's lumbermen when cut- 
ting down their fellows to get timber 



for the temple of Solomon, and heard 
them say, as they went by : " Spare 
them, they are not yet big enough." 
The great trees of California were 
giants when Columbus espied our 
shores. They were large and vigorous 
when the unknown and now perished 
race were building the cities of Central 
America, whose mere ruins, almost 
overgrown, remain to us. 

Now, as it takes a vast amount of 
time to develop a perfect vegetable, 
which is simple, compared with socie- 
ties of men and races, why is it sur- 
prising that the greater thing, the later 
and sublimer development, the unit 
of a final and perfected society, 
should run through long ages and 
cycles? 

2509. God's Kingdom a Long Re- 
sult of Time. — Late in the history of 
the world came Michael Angelo. 
There had been painters before him ; 
and there had been painters before 
them ; and there had been painters 
before them again. He was the prod- 
uct of generations of striving men. 
And what he did — well, he did it ; but 
he was simply the point through 
which all the efforts of the time past 
were expressing themselves. His art 
was the result of ages. Great as he 
was, he stood in his place in a long 
line of those who before him were 
working out the beautiful art by Di- 
vine guidance. And so, this kingdom 
of God, which consists in the sum of 
all the sanctified forces of the human 
race on earth, and which is a gradual 
and progressive kingdom, has been 
spreading from the first, sometimes in 
one direction and sometimes in an- 
other ; to-day in this nation, and to- 
morrow in another nation, and the 
next day in another. But the sum of 
all is finally to be gathered up by the 
great Worker, the one Artist, the only 
supervising Mind — God. 



THE HUMAN RACE 



535 



2510. World-Neighborhood. — Our 
magnificent harvest this year taxes the 
car, boat, and ship for its conveyance ! 
It makes America the purveyor and 
benefactor of impoverished nations 
abroad, whose famine keeps Fast to- 
day, while we roll in abundance and 
keep Thanksgiving. The world is but 
a neighborhood. Such is the facility 
of travel that one continent compen- 
sates the unequal seasons of another. 
This interlacing is but the primary and 
rude form of interchange which, with 
growing intelligence and skill in all 
nations, will bring in the joyful day of 
freedom to commerce and trade. 
Then, when we have free schools, free 
books, free papers, free conscience, 
free suffrage for man and for woman, 
and free trade, the whole world will 
have advanced far towards a world of 
fellow men — towards brotherhood and 
universal liberty. 

251 1. Warlike Energies Used for 
Peace. — It does not follow, because we 
do not any longer make war upon 
each other, that the armed hand will 
go out of use. No, swords are not to 
be thrown away ; they are to be 
beaten into pruning-hooks. The 
spear is not to be wasted ; it is to be 
made into an instrument of industry. 
So the crushing power, the organized 
physical force, that men now form into 
armies, and by which they sweep fel- 
low nations, is to be directed against 
nature — against the soil, against the 
rock, against metal. We are to pierce 
mountains ; we are to tunnel hills ; we 
are to cut ways for industry ; we are to 
rear up fleets ; we are to battle storms. 
We are to be warriors still, but war- 
riors for peace. And the ratio of civ- 
ilization will be found to be just in 
proportion to the difference that exists 
between the use of physical force for 
managing men, and the use of phys- 
ical force for controlling nature. 



2512. Fanaticism of the Je ws . — An 
Oriental nation is peculiarly accessible 
to excitement, and the Jews above all 
Orientals were open to its influence. 
Fanaticism lay dormant in every 
heart. Every Jew was like a grain of 
powder, harmless and small until 
touched by the spark, and then in- 
stantly swelling with irresistible and 
immeasurable force. 

2513. Moral Inferiority of the Greeks . 
— The Greek nation was and is con- 
spicuous above all that ever lived for 
intellectual genius. But in so far as 
any genuine development of social and 
moral character was concerned, you 
might as well undertake to bring forth 
harvest by starlight, as to have 
brought forth morality by Greek intel- 
lectual superiority. It was a nation 
beyond every other nation on the globe 
blessed with genius and cursed with 
immorahty. There never was con- 
science enough in the Greek people to 
maintain a cohesion that should estab- 
lish a government, and they fell apart 
and perished in their own moral rot- 
tenness. 

2514. French Estheticism. — The 
French people imagine themselves to 
be the modern Greeks. They are, in 
just the same way that swallows are 
eagles ! The Greek was at one ex- 
treme a sensualist, and at the other 
extreme a rationalist. The French 
have all the Greek sensuousness ; they 
have modern sentimentality, which 
the Greeks had not ; and they lack the 
abstract reasoning which the Greeks 
had. So they imitate the Greek at one 
end, and that the lower and less. 

2515. The Irish. — The Irish people 
stand alone. They are the most mer- 
curial, the most generous, the most 
distinguished for men of genius, the 
most admirable creatures that ever 
troubled the earth. Whether Ireland 
will ever be quiet depends on how 



S^(' 



MISCELLANEOUS 



many Irishmen emigrate. They are 
like whiskey, — not to be taken straight, 
but in mixture. 

2516. Germanic Spirit of Freedom. 
— We do not know exactly what is to 
take place in Germany. We know 
two things — that God reigns in heaven, 
and Bismarck on earth ! When Bis- 
marck dies, I do not know what the 
Lord will do ; something very different, 
I think, though. There is so much in- 
telligence, such a dawning sense of 
civil liberty, such an expansible force 
there, that though there may be a good 
deal of dislocation and ground-heav- 
ing, yet Germany, the Germanic stock, 
out of which have come most of our 
free institutions, laws, customs, will, I 
think, assert itself. Long smothered 
and held under, after a suitable time 
it will come to supremacy. 

2517. Despotism in Russia, — If you 
look at Russia it seems anomalous ; 
but it is not. It is avast inchoate em- 
pire made up of multitudes of people 
undertaking to live by the absolute 
will of the Emperor. If he could 
keep all people at a certain level, and 
take cognizance of it, Russia might 
get along very well ; but you cannot 
repress the intelligence that comes 
from the enlightenment of the com- 
mon people. It drifts through the air ; 
it is infectious, blessedly infectious ; 
and in all the provinces of Russia there 
is more or less development of human 
consciousness ; it is fermenting. There 
are no channels through which the 
great mass of the Russian peasants and 
citizens, with their rising intelligence 
and will, can act with the government. 
It acts on them, and does not want 
any reaction from them on it. This 
will be reconstructed. The recon- 
struction will come through long 
periods of sorrow and distress ; and 
yet, in the centuries it will be a won- 
derful mercy. It is like the plowing 



of an old field ; it turns under the 
grass and roots that remain ; it turns 
under weeds ; it turns under the nests 
of mice and sparrows ; it turns under 
crickets and insects : but the crop that 
comes afterwards makes up for the 
whole. 

2518. Negro and Indian, — The Afri- 
can is as different from the Indian as 
the vine is from the bamboo. A bam- 
boo grows without a tendril from top 
to bottom, and does not touch any- 
thing ; and that is the way the Indian 
grows. The vine, as it grows, throws 
tendrils out on every side, at every 
point, and in every direction. It 
clasps and leans upon everything that 
it can reach. And so it is with the 
African. 

2519, The American Negro, — I do 
not expect the blacks ever to come to 
their full possession of liberty and 
civility until they have had the equiv- 
alent of the Jews' forty years of pil- 
grimage. For saying so ten years ago 
[in 1866] I was held in derision and 
contempt by the Republican press at 
large ; but we shall have, at our leis- 
ure, time to revise all such judgments 
as that. Whenever you can construct 
human nature by a vote, or change it 
by legislation ; whenever you can 
handle men as the potter handles clay, 
then you may by an edict convert 
slaves into intelligent men instantly, 
blowing them, as you would soap-bub- 
bles, into objects of beauty ! But hu- 
man nature is the toughest thing that 
man ever works on. To take four 
million men of an inferior race, edu- 
cated in the school of slavery, and, by 
a constitutional vote of the people, 
make them as if they had never been 
ignorant slaves, is impossible ; and if 
men have expected it, it only shows to 
what overfed enthusiasm they were led. 

Men £-fV2v : and of all growths there 
is nothing that grows so slowly as 



THE HUMAN RACE 



537 



manhood. The reason why it grows 
so slowly is that there is so much of it, 
that it is so subtle, and that it is so 
precious in its results — for the best 
things are the scarcest, and are the 
longest in coming to perfection. 

2520. Delight of Peace After War. 
— [December, 1865.] The sudden and 
complete extinction of a national con- 
flagration of unparalleled magnitude 
has in it something that is sublime. 
The roar of battles has ceased ; armies 
are dissolved ; squadrons that shook 
the continent are distributed through 
shops, upon farms, and in all the ways 
of commerce. The suddenness of the 
beginning of the war has no parallel, 
except in the suddenness of its close. 
It opened with a sweep of fire, wide 
and rushing, like autumnal burnings 
on the prairie. It closed as when 
equinoctial storms pour down on the 
conflagration, and in one night drown 
every spark. And the end is com- 
plete and peremptory. No fretting 
and fiery edges of war remain; no 
spiteful guerillas ; no dens and lairs of 
skulking soldiery. The shock is over, 
and peace is established, to the con- 
fusion of every foreign prophet who 
predicted a long and tedious issue. 
How grateful is peace ! 

2521. Nomadic Americans. — Our 
people, nomadic as the Arabs, impetu- 
ous as the Goths and Huns, pour 
themselves along our Western border, 
carrying with them all their wealth 
and their institutions. They drive 
schools along with them as shepherds 
drive sheep, and troops of colleges go 
lowing over the Western plains like 
Jacob's kine. 

2522. The Common Language of 
America. — The time was when the na- 
tions of the earth were gathered round 
the old Tower of Babel to build it, 
and there was confusion of tongues, 
and they were driven apart from each 



other, and went every whither because 
they could not understand each other; 
but God has founded this continent as 
a new tower, and men that are speak- 
ing different languages are coming to- 
gether to build it up ; and they do un- 
derstand what each other is saying in 
silent language, and that is, that every 
other man is a brother. What was 
dispersed at the Tower of Babel is 
brought together again in America. 

2523. The Chinese in America. — We 
are in danger of repeating in our deal- 
ings with this race, the same violences 
which have so disfigured our history 
in reference to the African. It is the 
lion and the bear that will not suffer 
anything to come near them without 
putting their paw upon it ; and it is the 
animal blood-loving element in nations 
that rends the weak and the poor in 
their neighborhood. 

If this great civilized and Christian 
commonwealth cannot endure the con- 
tact of the Mongolian race, they 
should no longer lay claim to civi- 
lization and Christianity ; for the 
Christianity, the civilization, that sets 
itself against human beings of any 
class or country, instead of being the 
wisdom of God and the power of God 
unto salvation, is a mere soap-bubble, 
and the sooner it is burst the better. 
I am not sure that it would not be a 
good exchange to export some of our 
own heathen, and bring back some of 
the decent heathen from foreign lands 
in their place. 

2524. The Rise of Humanity. — The 
mistakes of men in one generation 
have constituted the seed-wheat of 
truths for the next generation. The 
heresies of one age are the orthodoxies 
of the next age. The infidelities of 
one period are the fidelities of another 
period. So the world has gone on 
opening and thinking, in chains, in 
bonds, and in gyves. Under all man- 



538 



MISCELLANEOUS 



ner of hindrances men have thought ; 
and much good has been wrought out 
by their thinking. But nothing ever 
had so hard a time in this world as the 
spiritual in man striving to get out of 
the reach of the material. It seems as 
though every man were born with a 
lion under him, and an angel on him, 
— and the angel has a hard time ! 

2525. Rise of the People. — When 
Christ was on earth potentates were 
kings " by the decree of God" ; subjects 
were to be obedient to them as a part 
of their duty to God ; and subjects 
had no rights which kings were bound 
to respect. If a king was humane, 
just and merciful, it was an accom- 
plishment ; and if he was not, he had 
a right to do what he pleased with his 
own : but to-day there is not a king in 
Europe that dare pronounce such a 
doctrine as that with any practical fol- 
lowing of it. Every man that reads or 
thinks knows that in the civilization of 
the globe, magistrates are servants, 
not masters. The people are the power. 
All authority is in them. . . . Never 
were there so many kings gone on pil- 
grimage as there have been within the 
last fifty years, ousted, thrust off from 
their thrones, sent abroad. There has 
been a gradual unfolding through cen- 
turies. When you look at the abso- 
lute subjection of the people two thou- 
sand years ago, and at their imperious 
and imperial rule to-day, in the great 
civilized nations of the earth, you will 
see what a change has run through the 
world. 

2526. Elevation of Christian Democ- 
racy. — When you cross the continent 
westward on the Union Pacific Rail- 
way, and reach the Rocky Mountains, 
you do not know it. You have been 
running up at a rate that seemed as if 
you were in a valley, almost. It was 
simply because the grade was so easy 
that when you got up to the top of the 



mountains they did not seem any 
higher than the plains below, and it 
was rising so gradually that first made 
them seem so low. But when you begin 
to go on the other side, and plunge down 
the gorges and caiions, the mountains 
seem very high from those low points. 
The general tendency of Christian 
democratic institutions is to raise the 
average of mankind, and as the aver- 
age goes up it becomes harder and 
harder for single men to stand as much 
above the level of their fellow-men as 
they did formerly. 

2527. Human and Divine View of 
Man. — Measured by their secular 
value, the greatest part of the human 
family are scarcely deserving of sym- 
pathy. 

There are ten hundred million men 
on the globe to-day, and I declare that 
the greater part of them are no better 
than caterpillars, so far as anything 
that they have done, or are doing, in 
this world is concerned. Caterpillars 
creep up on trees, and grow fat, and 
curl up, and die, and that is the his- 
tory of the greatest number of the 
human race. And now, of the vast 
swarms of human creatures on the 
earth, of the ten hundred million in- 
habitants of the globe, if you were to 
sweep out all except those who 
are making an impression on life, 
and who are measured by what 
they are doing, there would scarcely 
be one hundred million left ; the 
immense, immense majority would 
sink into utter contempt ! And noth- 
ing can redeem them from that state, 
but the belief that every one of them 
carries a spark which, though it be but 
the least sparkle of a flickering light, 
is to kindle the wick of that lamp 
which is never to go out. They are 
little enough now, because they have 
not grown much : but their life is not 
to end here ; it has only just begun; 



THE HUMAN RACE 



539 



it is to go sphering onward and onward 
beyond this world. 

2528. The Past not to Rule the 
Present. — The acorn has to die before 
the oak-tree can start. Early and 
rude developments are superseded by 
later and higher developments. The 
plowmen of our time do not shape 
their plows after the plows of antedi- 
luvian times, which were only crooked 
sticks. It is preposterous to say that 
we must go back to the past to find out 
what we may do. 

2529. Modern Increase of Fine 
Character. — As the sun never had such 
harvests as now, so there were never 
such harvests of the Sun of Righteous- 
ness as now. As there is more raised 
in the State of Illinois in a year now 
than there was in ten thousand years 
before the prairies were brought into a 
state of cultivation, so the products of 
morality and spirituality in this world 
are much more abundant to-day than 
they ever were before. In proportion 
as the minds of men are cleared, 
broken up, and rendered susceptible 
to the activity of the Divine mind, hu- 
man inspiration is increased, individ- 
ual by individual, family by family, 
and nation by nation. 

2530. Brotherhood Growing. — Take 
the element of humanity. Was there 
ever a time when the whole world's 
heart throbbed as it does to-day in 
response to calls for help that come 
from the needy? Let Chicago be 
burned, and, before the last peal of 
the alarm bells has sounded, from 
London thousands and hundreds of 
thousands of dollars are coming in. 
Let there be famine in India, and 
American Christians instantly send 
ships thither laden with supplies. Let 
disease sweep New Orleans, and every 
village or hamlet in New England 
takes steps for its relief. And do you 
tell me that humanity is growing less? 



It never was so broad and high and 
deep as it is to-day. 

2531. Benefactions of Inventors. — 
Inventors pre-eminently are benefac- 
tors, if they but knew it, and would 
take a benevolent view of their occu- 
piitions. A tool is but the extension 
of a man's hand ; and a machine is 
but a complex tool. And he that in- 
vents a machine augments the power 
of man. Men are as much mightier 
to-day than they were five hundred 
years ago, as all the machines of the 
world make them to be. For the ma- 
chinery of the globe, after all, is but 
the manhood of the globe, and repre- 
sents human power as it has been or- 
ganized. And he who increases this 
power by inventing a machine or tool, 
although he walks frequently unrec- 
ognized except as a mere commercial- 
ist, although he is called a mechanic, 
yet, if he be wise, he is a benefactor, 
and has a right to think so. 

2532. Divine Law of Betterment. — 
The treatment that is recorded from 
Genesis to Revelation indicates that 
somewhere or other there was an un- 
derlying science with regard to the 
characters of men. All solid science 
is working in this direction. Science 
is finding out what was hidden, and 
making known the unknown ; and the 
road that it is walking on to-day it has 
found recorded not on papyrus or 
parchment, not written on any tablet 
of brass or perishable stone, not ciph- 
ered on undecipherable brick, nor on 
any monument high in the air like 
Cleopatra's needle, but on the humble, 
low-lying rocks that contain the rec- 
ords of the earth's history. Science is 
deciphering it ; and among other 
things it says, " We have found out 
from these documents, preserved 
through uncountable ages, that things 
began at the very simplest elements. 
We have found out that there was a 



540 



MISCELLANEOUS 



current of influence which carried 
them on from siniphcity to complexity, 
and that tliere was an influence that 
carried them up from complexity to 
still higher and higher development 
and evolution, both of function and 
organ. We have found out that there 
is a stream of tendency that goes from 
worse to better, from lower to higher, 
from less beautiful to more beautiful, 
and from less useful to more useful." 

2533. Falling by the Way. — What 
army ever marched without raising the 
dust, without having some fall out of 
the ranks, without more or less igno- 
rance, and more or less sickness? And 
shall the whole population of the globe, 
in its unequalcd expansion and devel- 
opment, be supposed to go from lower 
to higher with no disturbance, no mis- 
chief? 

2534. Order in Disorder. — There 
seems to have been in this great turbu- 
lent world no more order, law, pro- 
cedure, than there is when two whirl- 
winds meet upon the ocean, and the 
heavens are black and vociferous with 
thunder, and the ocean is torn and 
scattered every whither; yet even in 
the most rending storms there are laws 
as clear and as determinate as those 
that are found in crystallography or in 
growth. There are laws under dis- 
order just as much as under order; 
and to those who look out upon the 
world as it is and has been, and have 
seen the universal strife and disorder, 
and have almost fallen into the unbe- 
lief of a providence, or of any tend- 
ency in human affairs, it is a great 
comfort if they can believe that, 
slowly as it is unfolding, there is a 
great tendency, and that the termina- 
tion of it, like the termination of vege- 
table growth, shall be the blossom and 
the fruit. 

2535. Law in the World's Tumult. 
— If you want to see confusion ap- 



parently worse confounded, go into 
a general post-office. Bushels of let- 
ters are tumbled around the great 
center-table. The nimble hands of 
the men catch them up faster than you 
or I can follow them, and every letter 
is turned the right way. After going 
through certain processes they are 
thrown into leather bags that are scat- 
tered all about the room, according to 
their respective destinations. The 
morning comes, and the mails go out, 
and each one of that enormous pile 
that seemed so tangled and confused 
having a special message and direc- 
tion, takes its own course. Though it 
seemed impossible that they could 
reach the places for which they were 
intended, they go north, and south, 
and east, and west, through streams 
and over railroads, and one is dropped 
in this hamlet, another in that village, 
and another in some other place, till 
they are all properly distributed. A 
million letters go forth from this single 
point, and not one fails to reach the 
person to whom it is addressed. 

Now the world is God's great post- 
office, where everything is turmoil and 
apparent disorder ; but there is a dis- 
tributive hand of Providence by which 
all things are disentangled. The issues 
and results show that in the midst of 
this tumult and disorder there is a 
guiding Power. 

2536. Regulation of Popular Unrest. 
— See what the ocean can do. Why, it 
storms and puts out the sun ! It sends 
to the bottom as an eggshell, the 
stoutest men-of-war. It lifts itself up 
in wrath such as no man can restrain, 
and men cower before it, and are as 
mere pigmies. Yet, a night goes, and 
the ocean is a mirror ; and the sun has 
not yet been wiped out ; and in its 
wildest confusion there was just as 
much law as in its calm, and under- 
neath it was held by the hand of Om- 



THE HUMAN RACE 



541 



nipotence. These were but moods ; 
yet all such moods run by law : and 
in regard to the tumults of the people, 
the concussions of interests, and all the 
changes that are going on, they are 
under regulation ; the calm will come. 

2537. World-Restlessness. — All Eu- 
rope to-day may be said to be boiling 
like a crater or a cauldron. It is at- 
tributed by some to the unmannerly 
restlessness of the common people, 
and by some irreligiousness and infi- 
delity are said to be the causes of it. 
That there may be some complication 
given to it by those undertones or dis- 
temperatures is very possible ; but I 
see in all these things the movement 
of that divine universal Providence 
which is lifting the world steadily up 
from its lower forms and conditions to 
higher ones. 

2538. Advance of Truth by Science. 
— Science has, one might say, un- 
packed the world ; for the world has 
been hke a huge trunk, with all sorts 
of things, fancy and worthless, in it ; 
and science has picked the lock, and 
opened the lid, and is gradually taking 
out the contents. 

2539. An Era for Glad Life. — It is 
a period of the world when men 
should take courage and be glad. I 
thank God every morning and every 
night, and a thousand times a day, 
that he permitted me to be born in such 
an age as this. Now a man lives a 
year in a day. Now men are not liv- 
ing in the world's January, in mid- 
winter, in a frozen ground where the 
roots can suck no juice, where no 
leaves are playing in the wind ; we 
are living in the month of May, when 
winter is gone, when the snows no 
longer cover deeply the earth, and 
when birds are singing in the air. 
There are storms, to be sure, but, 
after every thunderstorm, the leaves 
play, the roots grow, and ten thousand 



influences are operating to bring sum- 
mer. Let us, then, be patient. Let us 
be hopeful. Let us have faith in God. 

2540. The Chicago Fire : a Lesson 
in Heroism. — Where a whole commu- 
nity of men, who have been known as 
headlong in enterprise, as almost reck- 
less in speculation, were visited by this 
sweeping judgment, which paralyzed 
and bewildered those even a thousand 
miles distant, stand up again after this 
raging fire, brave and strong, their ex- 
hibition of manhood is incalculable in 
its benefit to the whole human family. 
It is a treasure to Asia, and may 
awake even her sluggish life. It is a 
treasure to Europe. It is a treasure 
wherever men care for and think 
about men. And tens of thousands 
of youth will be more than they would 
have been if it were not for this her- 
oism. Men in ranks, by hundreds, 
communities of men, will be nobler 
and more courageous for having be- 
held such a spectacle. Burn, build- 
ings ! go down, churches ! that we 
may see what lies beyond you. What 
the church has bred, and what the 
family has nourished, we see when the 
church is gone and the house has per- 
ished, and nothing is left but the men 
that have been made in them. 

2541. Three Stages of World- 
Growth. — I believe I have not used it 
for four or five years, though I often 
used it before that time — the figure 
that Agassiz uses ; namely, that the 
growth of a plant is in three stages : 
first, by the root, which is invisible, 
and is the slowest and longest ; second, 
by the stem, which is accelerated, and 
perhaps not half as long ; and third, 
by maturation or ripening, which is 
the quickest of all. The root takes a 
great while to grow ; the stem takes a 
Httle less time ; and when these two 
have become developed, they rush to 
the blossom, and through the blossom 



542 



MISCELLANEOUS 



to the fruit. And the last of the three 
periods is the shortest. 

So it is in history. The carher 
stages are very slow ; the intermediate 
stages are far faster ; and the final or 
ripening stages are very rapid. 

Now, as the past has been largely 
occupied by root-growth in moral 
things, and as the present may be con- 
sidered the period of growth by the 
stem, so I think we are standing on the 
eve of the period of growth by matura- 
tion and ripening. And when the 
world has entered upon this last period, 
then things will go forward with greater 
strides. Then the steps will be quicker 
and quicker, and the fruits will be 
more abundant. 

2542. Upward Movement of the 
Ages. — In organic and material nature 
there is an impulse, whatever it may 
be, by which things unfold and work 
steadily towards higher excellence. 
It is with immense waste, it is circui- 
tous, slow, with something of retro- 
action ; but the unfolding of nature by 
this mute and latent tendency to go 
towards a better future, leavens the 
world like yeast, and develops it as 
well. This is the spirit of the ages, 
the genius of the universe. All crea- 
tion is on the march. The stars are 
revolving. The dead crust of the 
earth feels the necessity of moving. 
The whole vegetable kingdom is mov- 
ing onward and upward. The animal 
kingdom, too, keeps step, unconscious 
of the impelling cause. Man, as if he 
heard the music drowsily and afar ofif, 
joins the strange procession, and strug- 
gles on and upward also. 

It is a strange march of creation, 
moving to unheard music, with unseen 
banners, to some great enterprise. 
When it shall finally encamp, and 
hang out the banners of victory, no 
one knoweth but Him who liveth in 
eternity, before whom a thousand 



years are but as one day, and one day 
as a thousand years. 

2543. Salvation of the Race. — Dis- 
miss the unworthy conceptions of 
Christ's " saving " which have sprung 
from a judgment formed upon the in- 
choate and undeveloped state of 
things that has existed hitherto. Many 
men seem to think that the Gospel is 
sent into this world as a lifeboat, to 
pick off from the foundering wreck as 
many of the great population as they 
possibly can, and let the rest go down. 
Thousands of churches and societies 
proceed upon the philosophy that there 
is no use of attempting to save the race. 
But Christianity is not a mere wreck- 
er's boat. In saving men, we ought 
to do it with the feeling that we are 
aiming towards the final consummation 
— the salvation of mankind. 

2544. The Splendor of Hope. — 
Looking down through the ages and 
hearing the thunder of groans, and the 
clash of battles, and seeing rivers of 
blood still rolling along the gulf-stream 
of time, seeing the world bestormed, 
and lurid tornadoes sweeping over the 
earth, it is an unspeakable gladness to 
see at the end, and on the horizon, the 
bright and glowing colors of triumph. 
I stop to gaze ; and that administra- 
tion which has seemed so doubtful, so 
dark, seems lighter and plainer. They 
who stand disengaged from the igno- 
rance and darkness of time ; they who 
are lifted up, and are at a point of 
vision where they can see the past, the 
present and the future — I behold them, 
not bearing witness to us, but in their 
own unconsciousness breaking out 
into ecstasies of gladness because God 
is justified. He who brought into ex- 
istence this globe, with all its miser- 
able populations, in the last estate 
shall be glorified in the thought and 
feeling of those who behold the end as 
well as look back to the beginning. 



NATURE 



543 



XLIV, NATURE 



2545. Love of Flowers. — A man 
that carries a garden in his heart, has 
got back again a part of the Eden 
from which our great forefather was 
expelled. 

2546. The Poet's Inspiration. — God 
gave Shakespeare power to breathe 
himself upon the world, and God gave 
us that nature by which we feel the in- 
spiration. Is this divine arrangement 
exhausted in man's earthly history ? 

2547. Illustrations from Nature. — 
Artificial hieroglyphics differ with age 
and nation. The Oriental cities had 
their special characters — the Egyptian 
his — the Aztec his ; and they differ 
one from another, so that one could 
not have read the written signs of the 
other. But the sun, the mountain, the 
ocean, the storm, the rain, the snow, 
the winds, lions and eagles, the spar- 
row and the dove, the lily and the 
rose, grass, earth, stones, and dirt, are 
the same in all ages, in all latitudes, to 
all people. And those truths that are 
expressed in the figures drawn from 
the natural world have relationships ; 
they are the most useful of all in the 
Bible, and the most frequent. 

2548. Mother Nature. — He early 
manifested a strong taste for Natural 
Science, yet was never satisfied with 
that part which the books contain, but, 
with an instinct as strong as that which 
leads an infant to its mother's breast 
for food, he turned from the dry de- 
scriptions and classifications to the 
living things themselves. 

2549. Artificial Religious Symbols. 
— I admit the need which men have 
of some concrete representation of in- 
visible truths. For that express pur- 
pose the whole globe has been fash- 
ioned. But men are absolutely afraid 
of Materialism in religion ! They 
dread to use the instruments which 



God ordained. With the saddest ego- 
tism, they set up artificial signs that at 
best but poorly suggest the pure, the 
true, the good, the infinite. Stars and 
suns give way to candles ; cotton and 
wool from the loom set aside the gar- 
ments of light with which God glorifies 
the world ; and while ten million flow- 
ers around the world offer perfume, 
men burn handfuls of frankincense in 
cramped temples. When the perfect 
day comes, all men will worship, and 
in Nature they will find all the sym- 
bols needed to set forth the glory of 
the incommunicable God. 

2550. Reading Nature Aright. — The 
roots of Nature are in the human mind. 
The life and meaning of the outward 
world is not in itself, but in us. He 
will see the most without who has the 
most within ; and he who sees only 
with his bodily organs sees but the sur- 
face. This superficial reading of Na- 
ture is as if one had been taught, like 
Milton's daughters, to read the Greek 
language fluently without understand- 
ing any part of its meaning. The 
sound is sweet, the reading is fluent ; 
but all the life and contents are want- 
ing. And he that reads Nature reads 
God's language ; but he only pronoun- 
ces the words, without the meanings, 
who sees the natural world by his senses 
only, and not also by his feelings. 

2551. How to Look at Scenery. — 
The eye is a daguerrotype-plate. It is 
set to receive pictures, not compose or 
paint them. The art of seeing well is 
not to think about seeing. Let your 
eye alone. Let it go as clouds go, 
floating hither and thither at their will. 
Things will come to you if you are pa- 
tient and receptive. No man knows 
what he sees, but only what he has 
seen. One looks at a great many 
things, but sees only a few ; and those 



544 



MISCELLANEOUS 



things which come back to him spon- 
taneously, which rise up as pictures, 
afterwards, are the things which he 
really saw. 

2552. Mind-Ownership. — When I 
go by the stately grounds and the 
house of the generous owner of 
Wellesley, do I envy him ? When I 
pass the mansion of Adams, who lives 
near Boston, in a kind of royal mag- 
nificence, do I envy him ? Do I envy 
them those gorgeous gardens, those 
rare and beautiful trees, those fine ter- 
races that look as if they might have 
been carved out of solid marble ? 
Why, I own them ! I can sit and 
pluck more flowers by my eyes than 
twenty gardeners can by their hands. 
I see these things, and I carry them 
away, and no sheriff arrests me. All 
that you who have such places get 
from them is that which you gather 
from them in the form of visible 
growths ; but I get more than that 
from them. You own the ground, 
and pay the taxes, and have the vex- 
ation of looking after your gardens, 
and wear yourself out with care ; and 
I get the honey. 

2553. Intangible Property. — When 
I am a bankrupt, and my creditor 
takes my house and my ground, I 
shall laugh at him if he thinks he has 
touched my properties. Above my 
roof are finer pictures than are under 
it. In the trees I have winged instru- 
ments which a sheriff will hardly 
catch. 

2554. Country Rest. — Even one 
day in the country is good. But not 
till you settle down, and cut the 
strings that bind you to the city, shove 
out its cares, and rid yourself of its 
excitements, can you feel the genuine 
comfort and happiness of being in the 
country. 

Now you have come to stay. The 
heaven arches over you with peculiar 



welcome. The clouds cluster along 
the horizon, or disperse and go a-sail- 
ing through the great aerial deep, as 
if to get up for you a celebration. 
You are adopted — a child at home. 
The great circle of hills gird you 
about, and all that dwells within its 
sphere greets you. 

2555. Natural Law. — No man, in 
his own case, dissevers mind and 
body, and says, " It was not I, but the 
body, that did it." And why should 
we disconnect God from nature, and 
say, "It was a natural law," as if a 
natural law was anything but God 
speaking, God pre-determining, and 
God letting his purpose stand ? 

2556. Law and Providence. — The 
popular idea is, and it is partaken of 
very largely by philosophical men, 
that natural laws are unchangeable, 
irresistible in their sphere, that they 
are not to be controlled, and that they 
compel all. It is felt as though the 
forces which they regulate were great 
energies that moved as bars of steel 
would move through crowds, over- 
turning, bruising and destroying 
all that came in their way. The 
irresislibleness of natural law is an 
illusion. Natural laws are constantly 
checked, constantly contradicted and 
made inoperative by man. They are 
set in conflict one against the other. 
The laws of chemical affinity are per- 
petually thwarted in the laboratory. 
The acid cannot have its way when it 
meets with an alkali, or the alkali 
when it meets an acid ; they make a 
compromise. In mechanics the law of 
gravity cannot pull down the stone 
which you put an iron pillar under to 
support. Everywhere throughout the 
world you can put law against law, 
and you can make a compromise not 
only, but you can make forces do, by 
the infusion of human reason and hu- 
man will, that which they would never 



NATURE 



545 



do of themselves. That is the root 
and fundamental quality of civiliza- 
tion, that at last large communities 
have gained such a knowledge of nat- 
ural laws that they have harnessed 
them and drive them for all work 
everywhere. Not by violating, either, 
but by using the laws of nature, men 
can and do create a providence ; and 
thus we come back to the gist of the 
matter. I can use the laws of nature 
so that they shall be a providence to 
me, and to my family. Surely, God 
ought to be able to do almost as much 
as that in the wider use of natural 
forces ! 

2557. Man Controlling Nature. — As 
man pursues upon the pampas of the 
South the wild steeds, and subdues 
them with bit and saddle, mounts and 
rides them, giving all their strength 
and speed to his own loins, so man is 
pursuing the forces and the laws of na- 
ture ; and all nature, as represented 
by this terraqueous globe, is now fol- 
lowing the weakness of the human 
thought. Against the mighty energies 
that seem omnipotent, the silent forces 
of the brain are acting. Thought, 
noiselessly — gentle as the light, as the 
falling dew — walks forth, revealing 
and subduing the mighty forces of na- 
ture that, at first, terrified, crushed 
and annihilated man. 

2558. Waste, in the Creative Proc- 
ess. — Through long periods all things 
tended to vary more or less from their 
original forms, and adapted themselves 
to their necessary conditions ; and 
what could not do this perished ; for 
the theory of Evolution is as much a 
theory of destruction and degradation 
as of development and building up. 
As the carpenter has numberless shav- 
ings, and a vast amount of wastage of 
every log which he would shape to 
some use, so creation has been an 
enormous waste, such as seems like 



squandering, on the scale of human 
life. 

2559. Superstition Dispelled by 
Righteousness. — I used to rise early 
and look over the valley of the Con- 
necticut, and see the sweet river and 
the whole beautiful country perfectly 
shrouded in dark, chilling mists. If I 
had gone with bellows and fanning 
machines and brooms and attempted 
to clear the fog out of that valley, I 
might have worked to this day without 
accomplishing the task. Yet, as I 
stood in the tower of the chapel, and 
watched the sun as it came quietly up, 
without boasting or pretence, but 
steadily shining, I saw, little by little, 
the wreathed mists begin to move and 
spread their wings, and, like birds dis- 
turbed, they flew away and left the 
great valley empty of their presence. 

Just as the sun knows how by its 
shining to deal with the chilling mists 
and to drive them forth from the val- 
ley, so the Sun of Righteousness 
knows how by its influence to deal 
with those things which envelope and 
obscure and chill the souls of men. 

2560, The Sun as a Symbol of 
Deity. — Sunlight as an object of pleas- 
ure, of admiration, and even of affec- 
tion, in the sense in which the term 
is applied to insentient things, is far 
beyond all other natural elements. 
There are no storms or convulsions in 
it. Its waves fill up the universe, but 
never rage nor utter sound. There is 
unwasting power, in utter silence. 
Sounds are very impressive, but silence 
is far more so; and to me no silence is 
like that of universal sunlight. Out of 
its stillness come all those energies 
which awaken life upon the globe. It 
is father of the forest and the field. 
It creates the currents of the ocean 
and the storms of the air, and yet the 
sunlight itself is forever tranquil. It 
is to me the most impressive feature of 



546 



MISCELLANEOUS 



the world. It is that symbol which 
most nearly represents the universality 
of God, the energy and fruitfulness of 
Divine power, and its modesty, as well. 

2561. The Word of God. —The 
snow came as death comes ; its ap- 
pearance was that of a shroud, but it 
bore in its bosom a silent hfe — a life 
not unfolded. It gave itself to the 
earth, and when by and by in vapors, 
little by little, it comes up again to 
hang as beautiful clouds in the sum- 
mer hang throughout all these re- 
gions, it has not returned unto God 
void. It has gone as a missionary 
goes, and has borne its message of 
life and growth to all the fields, and 
has accomplished that whereunto it 
was sent. "So shall my word be," 
saith God. 

2562. Nature's Wealth to be Found 
Out. — There were men that lay down 
and shook with cold and burned with 
fever, right under trees that possessed 
properties which, if they had availed 
themselves of them, would have cured 
them ; but they knew nothing about 
that. One day a poor Indian crept 
down to a spring where one of these 
trees had been overthrown by the wind, 
and drank of the water, which was 
bitter, and the drinking of which cured 
him. Some of his friends drank of it 
and were cured, also. And it was 
found out that in quinine there was 
cure for chills and fever. Before them, 
millions of men shook to pieces for the 
want of just that knowledge, and no- 
body gave it to them. There was 
cure in the bitter of these trees, but a 
knowledge of it was not disclosed. 
Trees have been full of remedies, the 
clouds have been doctors, every river 
has been adapted to cure disease by 
the most normal and appropriate 
methods ; and yet men have sickened 
and bloated and died for want of 
knowledge of these things. 



2563. The Curative Mountains. — 
Here are many afflicted ones, and all 
of them behaving just as if there was 
no such thing as Hay Fever. Think 
of such charming doctors as these 
mountains ! Cast back the memory 
to the powders, the pills, the decoc- 
tions, the elixirs, the snuff, the baths, 
the bandages, the goggles, the gar- 
gles, the vapor for the eyes, the 
trochees for the throat, the saline 
drinks to work off the various abom- 
inable draughts. But here are no bot- 
tles, vials, boxes, papers, but ?nountain 
air! The sun feels your pulse daily, 
looks you all over, and tells you to 
come again to-morrow. To-morrow 
he again inspects your case, and puts 
you upon a full course of air. The 
great round blue heaven above your 
head is your medicine-chest, and 
down drop from it every moment those 
restorative prescriptions which cure 
both soul and body. 

In despair of nurses, doctors and 
medicines, v/e devoutly join with the 
venerable Jew, and exclaim, " I will 
lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from 
whence cometh my help." 

2564. Gross Measurements. — There 
are a great many men that do not 
count that worth anything in this 
world which has not its representative 
in some physical good. There are 
men who, if you take them into your 
flower garden, will say, " Eh! auric- 
ulas, you call them ? Cinerarias, are 
they ? What do you do with them ? 
Are they good for greens? Do you 
boil them and eat them?" "No." 
" Do you sell them and get money for 
them?" "No." "Then what do 
you do with them?" "I look at 
them." "Look at them! And is 
that all they are good for, — to be 
looked at? I think if I were in your 
place I would spend my time in some- 
thing besides raising flowers just to 



NATURE 



547 



look at!" If they would feed the 
mouth or fill the pocket they would 
tempt such men. The fact that these 
things give comfort to the affections, 
feed the imagination, inspire the better 
feelings, and fill the higher ranges of 
a man's life, is nothing to them, for 
they are accustomed to measure every- 
thing by how it tastes, or how it feels 
in the pocket. 

2565. Filial Love. — I have, in my 
house, a little sheet of paper on which 
there is a faint, pale, and not particu- 
larly skillful representation of a hya- 
cinth. It is not half as beautiful as 
many other pictures I have, but I re- 
gard it as the most exquisite of them 
all. My mother painted it ; and I 
never see it that I do not think that 
her hand rested on it, and that her 
thought was concerned in its execution. 

Now, suppose you had such a con- 
ception of God that you never saw a 
flower, a tree, a cloud, or any natural 
object, that you did not instantly 
think, "My Father made it," what a 
delightful world this would become to 
you ! How beautiful would the earth 
seem to you, and how would you find 
that nature was a revelation of God, 
speaking as plainly as his written 
Word ! And if you are alone, in soH- 
tude, without company, desolate in 
your circumstances, it is because you 
have not that inner sense of the Divine 
love and care which it is your privi- 
lege to have. 

2566. Jewels, Spiritual Emblems. — 
A man is said in the Bible to be more 
precious than the gold of Ophir ; and 
of a woman it is said, " Her price is 
far above rubies." These were com- 
mon comparisons. There is some- 
thing in the glow of precious stones 
that peculiarly fits them to serve for 
such spiritual figures. There is about 
them a subtle light — a brilliancy — 
that burns without fire ; that consumes 



nothing, and requires no supply ; that 
forever shines without oil ; that is ever 
living, unwasting, unchanged by any 
of the natural elements. A diamond 
that glows in the sunlight flashes yet 
more beautifully in the night. No 
mould can get root upon it ; no rust 
can tarnish it ; no decay can waste it. 
Such stones seemed to the ancients, 
and are, fit emblems by which to repre- 
sent spiritual qualities, and the beauty 
and imperishableness of Christian 
virtue. 

2567. Recuperative Power of Good. 
— If the wild boar of the forests shall 
whet his teeth against some sapling 
oak, cutting it hither and thither, it 
lops and seems ready to fall, but 
steadies itself, and instantly nature be- 
gins to throw out new juices and form 
a line around the wound, and little by 
little new wood forms and the wound 
begins to be skinned over and heals 
itself; and after fifty years you come 
and you shall find a little scar there, 
and another bark formed on the old, 
and the tree is strong and vigorous 
again. Even in nature we have a 
symbol of the restorative power of 
good over evil. 

2568. God in Nature. — I have stood 
in the Milan cathedral ; I have stood 
in York Minster and in Westminster ; 
I have stood at Sahsbury ; I have 
stood at Winchester, noblest of them 
all ; and my soul has felt the inspira- 
tion and grandeur of these places. I 
have stood in the Temple Church of 
London, where the service lifted me 
on angel's wings, so that I scarcely 
knew whether I was in the body or out 
of the body ; and I thank God for 
these transcendent times — transfigura- 
tion hours, as it were. And yet up at 
Peekskill, on the side hill, among the 
crickets and grasshoppers and spiders, 
among the insects and birds, among 
the shrubs and leaves and tufted 



548 



MISCELLANEOUS 



grass, I have come as near to God as 
ever I did under the pomp of worship 
in Italy, or under the inspiration of 
choral song in old England — God 
bless her ! 

2569. God's Thoughts in Nature. — 
Such is the profusion of blossoms this 
summer that you can scarcely see leaf 
or twig. All through the country it is 
so. The peach-trees are holding up 
their silent lessons in pink, the cherry- 
trees and the pear-trees are holding up 
theirs in white, and the apple-trees are 
holding up theirs in both colors. All 
the grass is full of dormant flowers. 
Since it pleased God to give us the 
rains of a day or two past the grass is 
lifting up its hands and clapping them 
for joy. Already the staple birds are 
here — the weather-sparrows, the rob- 
ins, the bluebirds and the goldfinches, 
or yellow-birds. Also, the wanderers 
are coming back. Last night I heard 
geese flying, and to-day the bobolinks 
were in the field. Every other bird, 
almost, that we shall have through the 
summer, is present with us. All day 
long I have been thinking, sometimes 
of birds, sometimes of the Bible, some- 
times of flowers, and sometimes of the 
Saviour. It is difficult to tell where 
the transition is from one to the other. 
I have been pleased to sit and look at 
the meadows and the trees, and to 
think of the expressions in the Old 
Testament of the Psalmist, who spoke 
of the multitude of God's thoughts to- 
wards him. Innumerable, uncount- 
able, are the thoughts of God, and un- 
speakable in their tenderness. 

2570. The Kingdom of the Beauti- 
ful.— I wish you might have the com- 
fort that I have in looking upon the 
whole kingdom of the beautiful from a 
high point of view. Since I have 
learned to see in beauty a language of 
God and of the better world, there has 
been no measure nor bound to the 



comfort I have had in it. It has 
grown with my years and with my 
manhood. By reason of it I have 
company all the while. I have com- 
pany in artificial elements of beauty, 
and I have more company in natural 
elements of beauty. The winter is 
beautiful, and the summer is beautiful. 
All the gradations from winter to 
summer, and from summer back to 
winter again, abound in beauty. The 
whole round year is an encyclopedia 
of beauty that has as many volumes 
as there are days, and as many pages 
as there are minutes and seconds in 
each day. 

2571. Divine Love for Man. — Do 
the roots and grass and early flowers 
break forth from winter, and send 
messengers for the sun to come back ? 
or does the sun, come from its far 
voyaging, long to overhang the sleep- 
ing places of flowers until they feel his 
presence, and, drawn by his warm 
hands, wake and come forth into a 
warmth and a light that waited above 
them while they were dead, and that 
would have bathed them yet, and all 
summer long, though they had still 
lain torpid? 

2572. Beauty Inherently Divine. — 
As God has created the world, beauty 
is not a kind of seasoning scattered 
upon the weightier realities. Men 
think that the beauty of this natural 
world is a sort of decoration. As one 
builds a house, and then puts pictures 
in it, which are not really necessary to 
the well-being of the house ; as one 
spreads a table, and over and above 
that heartiness of food which is needed 
to supply the body with strength, gives 
something for the eye, sugaring over 
the loaf, and tucking in flowers here 
and there — things that are very well, 
but things that are not food, and 
might be dispensed with ; so men 
think that there is beauty, to be sure, 



NATURE 



549 



in the world, but that it is incidental in 
the great framework of things. But I 
aver that beauty is not only a part of 
the course of nature, so that if it were 
excluded the whole structure would be 
changed and reformed to a new ideal ; 
that it is not merely a decoration ; but 
that all things in the great scheme of 
evolution and development tend to- 
wards their highest estate by tending 
towards beauty. Maturity, whether it 
be of fruit, or flower, or what not, 
works by stages^towards beauty, in the 
material globe. 

So that beauty is not an accident. 
Still less is it the trimming which God 
gave to the perfected work. It is the 
Divine idea of a mode of creation. 

2573. Help of the Esthetic Element. 
— I find a great many persons who 
say, " I do not much enjoy going to 
church, but if I am permitted to 
wander out into the fields, along the 
fringes of the forests, and to hear the 
birds sing, to watch the cattle, and to 
look at the shadows on the hills, I am 
sure it makes me a better man." 
Some others, like my dear old father, 
would say, "That is all moonshine; 
there is nothing in it, no thought, no 
truth, and no doctrine of edification." 
But there is truth in it. There are 
minds that open to spiritual things 
through that side of their nature more 
readily and easily than through any 
other. This should be recognized. 

2574. True Art. — Artist is Inter- 
preter. He teaches men by opening 
through imitation the message of 
deeds, events, or objects, so that they 
rise above the senses, where before they 
had exclusively presented themselves, 
and speak to the higher feelings. A 
man who sees in Nature nothing but 
materiality, is no more an artist than 
he is a musician who, in one of Bee- 
thoven's symphonies, hears only 
noise. 



2575. The Great Artist. — Behold in 
the morning frost-pictures, wrought 
without color and kissed upon the 
window by the cold lips of Winter, 
another instance of that Divine ben- 
eficence of beauty which suffuses 
the heavens, clothes the earth, and 
royally decorates the months to fill 
the world with joy, pure as the 
Great Heart from which it had its 
birth. 

2576. The Meanings of Flowers. — 
Do you think that words, in and of 
themselves, have any signification ? 
Words mean whatever they have the 
power to make us think of when we 
look on them. So flowers mean what 
sentiment they have the power to pro- 
duce in us. The image which a 
flower casts upon a sensitive plate is 
simply its own self-form ; but, cast 
upon a more sensitive human soul, it 
leaves there not mere form, but feel- 
ing, excitement, suggestion. God 
gave it power to do that. 

2577. A Border Line. — We love to 
fancy that a flower is the point of 
transition at which a material thing 
touches the immaterial. It is the 
sentient vegetable soul. 

2578. Associations with Nature. — 
Young trees and young men are got 
up too nicely — trim and snug ! Only 
when a tree opens its top, and lets the 
sunlight clear into its very center, 
does it begin to be noble. Old trees ! 
unlike old men, they have no infirmi- 
ties. Their strength does not depart, 
and their glory abides ! Happy are 
they who frolic under them in child- 
hood, and who sit in old age calmly 
beneath their shadow. We give out 
something of our life to the things 
which surround us. And trees, water- 
brooks, beetling rocks and hill-tops 
register our thoughts of sorrow, or our 
great joys ; and, in after years, we re- 
call much of our inward experience 



SSo 



MISCELLANEOUS 



from the voiceless teachings of inani- 
mate things ! 

2579. Bird-Nature. — A robin may 
be chased with as much impunity as a 
house fly. It does not disgust him. 
He comes back. In cherry time you 
cannot drive them away. If you 
come close to the tree, they merely 
get higher, or skulk behind the leaves ; 
or if you pelt them, they fly but a rod 
or two, hold their tongues, and the 
moment you turn your back, they fly 
again into the tree. Robins have no 
delicacy, no tender sensibilities, that 
keep them back in the world. But 
their cousins, the wood-thrushes, are 
sensitive and retiring. They shrink 
from observation. No compliment 
can be greater to a dwelling than to 
have wood-thrushes adopt it, and 
build in its new trees, and sing their 
bits of melody right over your head. 
Colleges give many diplomas not de- 
served. Nature is the only university 
that can confer a diploma worth hav- 
ing, and that conveys no false praise. 

2580. A Bird's Lesson, — " Behold 
the fowls of the air ; they sow not, 
neither do they reap, nor gather into 
barns." 

I thought of that to-day, for when I 
was very busy sowing some seed, a 
bobolink flew over my head, with a 
wild, sarcastic descant, as much as to 
say, "Go on, old clod-crusher! you 
sow, and I will rejoice." He flew 
past, and I understood him. 

2581. Modest Merit. — What is the 
magnificent dome of St. Peter's but 
the highest development of that idea 
which you shall see expressed or 
hinted in every well-conditioned 
pumpkin ! Thus a few acanthus- 
leaves, touched by human genius, 
gave us the Corinthian capital. The 
arches of the forest, we are sometimes 
told, are the primitive types of Gothic 
architecture. Do not leaves, stems, 



roses, flower-de-luces, sunflowers, 
clover-leaves, and scores of other 
things, furnish to architecture its rich- 
est decorations ? But it was reserved 
to the pumpkin to crown the whole, by 
giving to architects the conception of 
a ribbed dome. 

Thus it is that modest merit often 
finds itself honored. 

2582. The Aspen-Tree. — At times, 
in certain moods, one cannot help 
thinking that the aspen is striving to 
communicate something. It seems to 
sigh and pant. It supplicates as one 
that suffers. Then, changing sud- 
denly, it coaxes and winks and blinks 
at you as if it was only in fun. It will 
stand perfectly still a minute, as if 
looking to see what you will do, and 
then a laughing ripple runs all over it. 
It frolics with the same tireless grace 
as a kitten. Indeed it is a kind of 
compound kitten-tree, each leaf a par- 
ticular kitten, all frolicking together, 
though there is not one of them, if the 
rest won't play, that is not ready, 
kitten-like as it were, to chase its own 
tail. 

2583, The Elms of New England, 
— They are as much a part of her 
beauty as the columns of the Parthe- 
non were the glory of its architecture. 
Their towering trunks, whose massive- 
ness well symbolizes Puritan inflexi- 
bility ; their over-arching tops, facile, 
wind-borne and elastic, hint the end- 
less plasticity and adaptableness of 
this people ; — and both united, form a 
type of all true fnanhood, broad at the 
root, firm in the trunk, and yielding at 
the top, yet returning again, after 
every impulse, into position and sym- 
metry. What if they were sheared 
away from village and farmhouse ! 
Who would know the land? Farm- 
houses that now stop the tourist and 
the artist, would stand forth bare and 
homely ; and villages that coquette 



NATURE 



SS^ 



with beauty through green leaves, 
would shine white and ghastly as 
sepulchers. Let any one imagine 
Conway or Lancaster without elms ! 
Or Hadley, Hatfield, Northampton, or 
Springfield ! New Haven without 
elms would be like Jupiter without a 
beard, or a lion shaved of his mane ! 

2584. Trees. — Though money can 
do almost all things, it cannot make 
young trees old, nor old folks young. 
Here am I surrounded with old, old 
elms, huge in trunk, with vast 
branches, each large as a tree, 
stretched out afar, to gain some light 
and liberty, and yet all feeding by the 
same root. One looks up into this 
vast canopy as into the nave of a 
cathedral ; yet no cathedral was ever 
so beautiful. What architect would 
dare stretch out stone like these 
branches ? With their immense 
weight, they lie upon the air as seem- 
ingly light as a feathery spray. Run 
your eye from their summit back to 
the trunk. What immense leverage ! 
Upon these huge arms winds play and 
storms have wrought. Out of these 
rude and shapeless things storms have 
even evoked music. All along the 



weather-open spaces, moss in green 
patches lies along the rugged boughs, 
poor and weak in itself, yet able, of 
its mere beauty, to add grace to this 
giant tree. ... I look enviously 
upon this and its companion trees. 
No money can build such as these. 
Nature cannot be bribed to furnish 
them to order. While waiting for 
them we die ! One should have an- 
cestors. No matter about what they 
put in their wills, if only they will 
plant enough trees, which, when we 
come along, shall be old and huge ! 

2585. The Balm of Nature. — So, 
spent by labor and worn out by grief 
of heart, Jesus yearned for the wilder- 
ness. No man attempts to do great 
things for his time and for his people, 
that he does not long for the wilder- 
ness. The more you love men, the 
more, sometimes, it is impossible to 
endure them ; at times you go into the 
forest, when trees seem more to you 
than men with their selfishness, un- 
charitableness, and hardness ; and it 
is a comfort to me to know that my 
Master was homesick and worksick, 
and longed to get into the wilderness, 
where no man could find him. 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



Abhorrence — Definition of, 1379. 

dangerous but needful — Fire, 1379. 
Achievement demands further achievement 
— Mountaineering, 478. 
happiness in — Not fly, but beaver, 552. 
Activity, duty of — Puddle and flowing 
stream, 536. 
excessive — Cavour, Bismarck, Bright, 

Lincoln, 582. 
outruns trouble — Dust on the road, 555. 
quality in — Fly and bee, 548. 
Account, taking, of one's self — Business 

department record, 465. 
Adam as a type of mutable man — Unlike 
perfect animals, dove, eagle, 70. 
fall of — Unscriptural bastard Jewish 
belief, 2210. 

theory of human ruin in — Red-hot 
sword, 2214. 
our responsibility for — \\Tiipping child 
for great-grandfather, 2212. 
Adolescence, dangers of — Fermentation, 

46. 
Adversity — Brazier's hammer on kettle, 

633- 

— God's mint, 623. 

and prosperity — Wax and rock, sun and 
frost, 627. 

beneficence of— Palette ;"violence ; grape- 
crushing, 638. 

heroes of — Acceptance of losses, 640. 

man's need of — Dull tools, 629. 

nobility in — Southern gentlemen after 
civil war, 676. 

recuperation under — Fruit after prun- 
ing, 669. 

revealing hidden beauty — Geologizing 
for crystal, 646. 

sweetness after — Ripened fruit after 
frost, 635. 
in — Flowers beside glacier, 691. 

tests friendship — Wave-crest, trough of 
sea, 672. 
Affections transitory — Lamps burned out, 

380. 
Affliction hardens or softens — Clay or wax, 
227. 

comforted by comforting others — Be- 
reaved mother caring for orphans, 239. 



Affliction, darkness of, indispensable- 
Shining of stars, 272. 
tempered — Boy whipped with clothes 

on, 667. 
works out character — Tempering of 
steel, 657. 

Ages to come — Development of human 
reason, 345. 

Aggressiveness arouses evil — Pole stirs 
mud, 754. 

Agnosticism natural — A Raphael demon- 
strable only to art-lover, 11 12. 

Alcoholic drinking — Navigating Hell-gate, 

1374. 
Almsgiving for reputation, hypocrisy — 

Counterfeit coin, 2393. 
America, brotherhood the language of — 
Babel dispersion regathered, 2522. 
feeding the nations — World-neighbor- 
hood, 2510. 
Chinese in — Our Christian treatment, 

lOOI. 

American armies dissolved — Summer 

storm, 984. 
civil war, approach of — Barometers, 

981. 
constitution — Caissons of Brooklyn 

bridge, 964. 
fame of Grant — Towers of Brooklyn 

bridge, 988. 
flag — Description of, 985. 
immigration — Fertilizing mud of floods, 

995- 

perils — Mammon worse than Despo- 
tism, 1002. 

political elasticity — Thoroughbred horse, 
989. 

polyglot population — Tower of Babel, 
1014. 

prosperity and peril — Wealth and ig- 
norance, 990. 

public amusements — Rest, 999. 

righteous national career — Ship and 
compass, 1015. 

soldiers in civil office — Washington and 
Grant, 988. 

suppressed repudiation — Measles, 1004. 

the nomadic — Drive schools like sheep, 
colleges like kine, 2521. 



553 



554 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



American In-atmcut of Indians — Faulty 

insli unients of Providence : Jacob ; 
Engl-'ind, 994. 

Amusement to be discriminated — Food, 

54- 

Anarchism and communism — Pliilosopliy 
of the gutter, 996. 

Anniiiilation an unnatural idea — Harriet 
Marlineau, 338. 

Angelic ministrations to Jesus — Twilight 
of dawn, splendor of morning, 1921. 

Anger, just, purifies — Fierce summer 
storms, 424. 
trutli in — A straight-shooting bow, 951. 

Antiquated religious thought-forms — Me- 
dieval castles, 2197. 

Anxiety — Friction in machinery, 2022. 
may paralyze — Water-logged timber, 

739. 
morbidly desired — Stimulus of poison, 
1994. 
Apocalypse — Sunset ; irregular drama ; 
strange music ; conflicts ; tableau, 195 1. 
and arithmetic — Frescoes and weight- 
measurement, 1949. 
Apocalyptic figures not reducible to in- 
tellectual ideas — Sucking joints of 
crab, 2262. 
Apostolic arguments now — Modern 
science in Jerusalem Temple, 2279. 
heresy — Knox, Edwards, Paul, 2190. 
quality — Spirit, not old clothes, 2172. 
succession — Hand of Holy Ghost on 
heart, 2278. 
Approach to God easy — Uphill is down- 
hill, 1203. 

men varied — Access to burning 
building, 2321. 
Architecture from nature — Examples, 

2581. 
Artist, tlie great — Frost-pictures, 2575. 
Ascetic Christianity — Abandonment of 

arms in war, 2192. 
Asleep in Jesus — Weary child in mother's 

arms, 302. 
Aspiration — Vine-clinging and climbing, 

exacting — Climbing Natural Bridge, 
Va., 1662. 

transient — Lightning at night, 1437. 

undeveloped — Wistaria, stunted, trans- 
planted, 1085. 

yearnings of — Evaporation under the 
sun, 1329. 
Association, power of — Eating; the table, 

,S42. 
Athletics, clean — Bowling and garden- 
hoeing, 209. 

improving — Billiards and bowling in 
Christian institutions, 55. 



Atonement in God's love — Silver arrow 
from eternal bow, 1157. 
human side of the — Starlight, 1290. 
self-sacrificing love — Motherhood, 1289. 
Attraction of God — Sun's evaporation of 

water, 2027. 
Avarice — Sea-worm piercing ships, 1007. 
Avoidance of evil, negative — Keeping 
down weeds, 1029. 

Baby, birth of — Bird flown in at window, i. 
lessons taught by — Little preacher in 

cradle, 3. 
lost, is kept — Shrined in imagination 

ever a babe, 262. 
never ugly to mother's eye — Feather- 
less lark-squab, 2. 
Ballot, power of — Spring rains, 974. 

silence of — Voice of millions of men, 975. 
Bankruptcy, generous dread of — Fall of 
huge tree in forest, 560. 
manliness in — Athlete stripped for con- 
test, 561. 
Baptism, declaratory not active — Heart- 
clean as body clean, 2137. 
disputes over method — Husk of exter- 
nality, 1923. 
outward sign of supposed inward condi- 
tion — Soldier's cockade, 2138. 
Beatitudes, the — Beauty of precious stones, 

1931- 
— Jewel case for beautifying God's 

bride, 1523. 
— Solemn hymn before service, 
1932. 
Beautiful, the, speaks of God — Year a 

cyclopedia of beauty, 2570. 
Beauty a divine idea in creation — Evolu- 
tion towards perfectness, 2572. 
helpful towards spirituality — Esthetic 
needs of the soul, 2573. 
Beginning life aright — Building above 
flood-line, 64. 
of evil to be resisted — Prairie fire, spread 

of, 58. 
of good encouraging — Gold particles to 
miner, 1023. 
Belief and imagination — The Phidian 
Zeus, 1976. 
easy to unsettle, hard to fashion — Au- 
gustine, Arminius; Calvin; Edwards, 
1979. 
sincerity and wrong — Lead for tools, 
triangle for wheel, 1977. 
Beliefs, commonly liyjiothetical — Marine 
shells on inouiitain-top, 2238. 
enforcing uniformity of— Fitting all feet 
to one foot print, 1973. 

— Minting men as dollars impos- 
sible, 1973. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



555 



Beneficence, spirit of — Summer Ihundcr- 

showcr, 1 171. 
Benefits remembered — Mountain peaks in 

sunset, 1093. 
Benevolence ami affinity — Interest in the 
needy, and in the happy, 2391. 

and ahns — Helping a life; giving 

quarter, 2405. 
generosity — Regular army and 
militia, 2386. 
genuine, even humble, influential — 

Widow's mites, 2406. 
in God — Genius for music, poetry, 

"45 

limited — Speaking acquaintance with 
faculties, not intimate, 2387. 

long-lived — Endowed benefactions, 
2402. 

native, irrepressible — Ground-springs in 
foundations, 241 1. 

not enterprising — Stays at home, 2384. 

or personal love — Ministering to a low 
or a charming child, 2392. 

permanent, belter than charities — Or- 
ganized institutions, 2400. 

requires force — Surgeon amputating leg, 

2397- 
Benevolent man sees divine benevolence 

— Gold streaked through rock, 2395. 
Bereavement, expansion of life — 

Mourner seeks the lost beyond 

earth, 270. 
God says is grievous — Foolish parent's 

lie about medicine, 234. 
Best, the, for God — Not chaff and shucks, 

'535- 
Betterment, divine law of — Written on the 

rocks, 2532. 
Between sorrow and gladness — Pendulum, 

255- 
Bible, The— A map, i860. 
— A telescope, 1834. 
— Winchester cathedral, 1844. 
a growth — The human race, 1837. 
an everyday book — Pitched to key of 

common life, 1846. 
as furniture — Unlighted candles, 1859. 
associations with — Old family estate, 

1872. 
blind reading of — Unseen wood-carvings 

in forest, 1857. 
buried under rubbish — Oriental cities, 

1953- 

careless reading of — Country lane, 

sward and flowers, 1858. 
coeval with man's need — Medicine of 

sorrow, 18S3. 
conflict over — Garden desolated, 1957. 
does not create but expounds truth — 

Scientific books, 1838. 



Bible, The, doubt of, bad as unbelief- 
Compass, 1870. 
guidance of, far-reaching — Candle to 

lost traveler, 1873. 
guides moral life-centers — Key to clock, 

■^63- 
guide to right living — Navigation chart, 

1869. 
ignorance of its promises — First use of 

tea, potatoes, 1854. 
immutability of — Stars independent of 

astronomy, 19 13. 
individual interpretation of — Learning 

natural law, 1850. 
infested by controversialists — Summer 

insects, 1954. 
interpreted by the world — A flower, 

1838. 
interprets laws of life — Expert phy- 
sician, 1862. 
literary carelessness of — Roughness of 

trees, 1847. 
man's duty not dependent on — Path, 

guide ; voyage, compass, 1969. 
man's regulator — Ship's chronometer, 

1868. 
many-sidedness of — Alphabet, 1845. 
most delightful portions of — Webster on 

Shakespeare, 1968. 
mystical interpretations of — Clouds 

without rain, 1842. 
not dependent on any one of its books — 

Imperfect joist in building, i960, 
manufacture but germ — Seed of 
divine life, 1966. 
of conflict — Lovely valley after battle, 

1959- 
letter not spirit — Winter bird's-nest, 

564- 
opened, not made known, by scholarly 

helps — House-key, 1840. 
jiermanence of Divine memorials in — 

Greek gods in Louvre, 1963. 
perpetuity of — Grape-cluster and wine, 

1912. 
petty errors in — Spiders or dust in Par- 
thenon cornices, 1965. 
printed, a memorial of life — Chart of 

the ocean, 1836. 
readers of, find their own affinities — 

Magnet and iron, 1849. 
reading, for conflict — Arsenal, 1958. 
skimming — Skating not reading, 

1856. 
small texts of, with great meaning — 

Boy's kite-string, 1911. 
spiritual discernment of — Metallurgist 

and ore, 1851. 
study of, followed by practice — New 

York harbor-chart, 1865. 



55f' 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Bible, The, study of, needs bctlcr instiu 
mcnts — Tools for maliogany, 1952. 
texts useless unless piaclically used — 

Farm, 1S48. 
to aid in, not solve, man's perplexities 

— No gardens created, 1967. 
to be applied — Chart and navigation, 
1852. 
practiced — Reading and speaking 

French, 161 2. 
read for siiccific purposes — Medical 

book for cure, 1S53. 
searched for treasure — Bees after 

honey, men after gold, 1855. 
tested by experiment — Cookery 
recijie, 1865. 
trifles in, often significant — Fossil fern, 

1874. 

truths newly discovered in, not new- 
Gold newly dug, 1841. 

of inspiration in — Wheat growing 
on straw, 1876. 

unfound treasures in — Medicinal roots, 
1861. 

unity in diversity of — Winchester ca- 
thedral, 1961. 

unknown beauties of — Heir of baronial 
estate, 1866. 

unused parts of — Chambers in old cas- 
tles, 1875. 

use of, good or bad — Iron ore, forest 
timber, 1S71. 

vital elements of, universally accepted 
— Laws of electricity, 1889. 
Biblical allusions explained by facts — Sil- 
ver ore, 1843. 

commentary, the best — Living Chris- 
tian, 1715. 

controversy hurtful — Wounds and scars 
of war, 1955. 

exactitude a fatal claim — Unimportant 
printer's error on chart, 18SS. 

excision of errors not invalidating — 
Wrong paper among deeds, 1964. 

inspiration — I'oetic insjiiration, 1835. 
method of, unimiiortant — Rose-fra- 
grance, 1867. 

inspired use of uninspired material — 
Official genealogies, 1886. 

literature adapted to original readeis — 
No legal expositions in nursery, 18S1. 

texts — Lulian amulets, 1848. 
Bird nature — Description, 2579. 

lesson from the — Bobolink, 2580. 
Blessings despised — Israelite and manna, 
I197. 

for curses — Artillery, 1687. 
Body and soul — Rock and crystal, 652. 

a sound, i)areiital obligation — Temple 
or hut for the children, 137, 



Body, care of the — Engineer with his ma- 
chine, 184. 
food for the soul — Leaves of leguminous 

plant, ioi8. 
marvelous organization of — Members 

described, 181. 
to be left on earth — Sepulcher as a 

sieve, aio. 
tends to obey mental suggestion — Im- 
pulses to be guarded, 365. 
Bondage of body and brain — Hoe and 

catechism, 2040. 
Book, a — Cjarden ; orcliard ; storehouse ; 
company ; counselor ; multitude of 
counselors ; fruit-tree, 2435. 
Books — Windows, 2436. 

of science and physical truth — The 
Bible and moral truth, 1838. 
Border line between material and im- 
material — A flower, 2577. 
Born again, and again — Tree, every 
spring, 1595. 

cajiacity to be — Elasticity of soul, 
'586. 
Boys in pious biographies and the real — 
Chicken dressed for eating, and free 
fowl, 18. 
Brain ])ower without health — Razor with- 
out a handle, 195. 
Brains and natural law — Taming wild 

horses, 2557. 
Brotherhood does not imply equality — 
Grass is grass, trees are trees, 2495. 
growing — Chicago fire; famine in India, 

2530. 
of man — Acquaintances; companions; 
brethren, 877. 
Burden bearing, noble — W^asherwonian 

with bundle on head, 1732. 
Business and religious feeling — Sponge 
squeezed dry, 584. 
belter morals in — Partner with God, 

557- 

Christianity in — Unwelcome Bible texts, 
566. 

complications — Tangled knot, 558. 

crafty devices in — Sleight in chess-play- 
ing. 565- 

crooked self-deception in — Man's ear, 
devil's pulpit, 568. 

danger-signals in — Torpedo-mines in 
war, 569. 

dejiression demoralizing — Fungi on 
trees, 700. 

failures and recoveries — Death and res- 
urrection, 6S0. 

man retiring from — Last year's mullein- 
stalk, 586. 

men's virtues — Polar expeditions, 
science, etc., 588, 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



557 



Business, moral principle in — Compass in 
navigation, 563. 

other men's crookedness in — Bank 
clerk, 567. 

unfavorable to meditation — Astronom- 
ical observatory in city, 556. 

Calvinism and Arminianism — Governor 

and governed, 2201. 
inlluences of — Cloud hiding glory of 

God, 2205. 
persistent power of — Musk in a chest, 

2200, 
problems of — Not nuts but marbles, 

2202. 
Capital, may succeed slavery, as national 

evil — Devil gone into something else, 

2505- 
Care — Friction of the mind, 736. 

— Rust, 481. 
casting, on God too temporary — Soldiers 

stacking arms for dinner, 1S30. 
not to be emphasized — Soldier recount- 
ing petty camp-troubles, 73S. 
to be lived above — Birtls flying above 

dust, 740. 
Carelessness, dangerous — Roots grow 

dee])er, 728. 
Caressing children — Green leaves of the 

drooping tree, 13. 
Catching men — How to fish, 2312. 
Cause and effect — Sowing and reaping, 

140 1. 
Character and countenance — Washington, 

895. 

credit — Commercial credit a moral 

premium, 900. 
reputation — Sweet odors and 
stenches, 896. 

beautified by experience — China decora- 
tion, 73. 

beginnings of — Drops, rill and river, 
899. 

building — Erection of great edifice, 
4S0. 

compensations in — Good (jualities cover 
blanks, 390. 

depth of — Heaving the lead, 907. 

durability of — Well-built ship, 469. 

inlluence of — Lying boy with manly 
man, 865. 

matures slowly — Late-bearing apple- 
tree, 1705. 

nature of — Woven web, 892. 

not judged by single traits — Lovable 
man and burglar, 470. 

revelation of — Cocoanut, 697. 

slow growth of — Acorn and oak, 1638. 

strong, takes best polish — Knotty tim- 
Ic", 476. 



Character, substance in — Iron for temper- 
ing, 1644, 
three tests of — Sound timber, 479. 
to be perfected — Becoming an artist, 

'593- 
polished — Engines and mathemat- 
ical instruments, 17 14. 

unwise, building — Swiss cottage in Alps, 
631. 
Cheating, petty — Water drops in river 

levee, 747. 
Cheerfulness, curative effect of — Dr. Grid- 
ley, 494. 

power of — Happy workman, 486. 
Child death needs heaven for consolation 
— Snowy March burial, eternal sum- 
mer, 223. 

greeted with peace — " I give you 
joy my darling," 224. 

Christ in the heart of a — Babe Jesus to 
be treated as a babe, 38. 

feeds on mother mentally — As physi- 
cally, II. 

habits — Faster than colors dyed in the 
wool, 12. 

training continuous — Dish seasoned 
while cooking, 10. 

worthless except for future — Acorn, 5. 
Childhood disciples of Christ — Budding 
and grafting in spring, 29. 

conversions need tender care — Newly 
born babe ; growing tree, 37. 

the time for impressions — The " bis- 
cuit " stage of porcelain, 30. 
Children and God's handiwork — Gardener 
and chaplain, 40. 

departed — Dandelion : mat, circle, 
globe, 231. 

driven to deception — Hare pursued by 
Fox, 14. 

inheritance of — Thief, drunkard, and 
godly parent, 41. 

lies told to — Thick as cloves in a ham, 
20. 

managed by inciting right moods — 
" Like breeds like," 25. 

ministry of, to memory — Artists of in- 
visible pictures, 42. 

need simplicity — Long words hail on 
slate roof, 34. 

not to be worried — Bell mutllcd by 
hand, 39. 

sensitive, promise high things — Spring, 
summer and autumn, 33. 

Sunday of, to be joyful — Author's boy- 
hood, 26 

taught truth by fiction — Lion, wolf, 
lamb, 35. 

teaching parents — The miner going 
home, 36. 



558 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Children to be guided in Old Testament — 
Cromwell's portrait with wart, 27. 
held to present duties — Birds forc- 
ing their young to fly, 31. 
treated with respect — Not rug to 
wipe feet on, 19. 
well brought up — Willow branch taking 

root in own soil, 154. 
will respond to culture — Development 
of wild roses, 32. 
Child's faculties — Tools unused, 8. 

feeble morality — Lameness, blindness, 

deafness, 17. 
gift of love — More precious than older 

sister's accomplishments, 21, 
immoral tendencies — Little animals to 
be trained, 9. 
Chinese ill treated in America — Lion and 

bear nature, 2523. 
Choosing, more than desiring — Blossoms 
and fruit, 51. 
a life-partner — Baxter's opinion, 112. 
Chosen not, because not clioosing — Naa- 

man, 1 560. 
Christ — The one door, 1284. 

abiding influence of — Friendship; great 

men, 1259. 
admiration not love of — Plato; watch- 
maker, 1224. 
and the Church — Husband and wife, 121. 
Jewish law — Apple-tree, winter and 
spring, 1243. 
as leader — Inspiration of great com- 
manders, 1276. 
bearing the Cross — Early and later art- 
conceptions, 1248. 
body of, the — Mankind, 879. 
coming to — Friend, not magistrate, 1287. 
conceptions of — Spiritual photographs, 

1295. 
confessed — Marriage service, 1447. 
continuing power of — Picture hung in 

air, 1258. 
controversies about — Battlefields on 

jieaceful meadows, 1938. 
convincing beauty of, in men — Natural 

beauty contrasted, 1279. 
fasliioned by — Vase from artist-potter, 

1270. 
gifts of love to — Forget-me-not sprig to 

maiden, 1277. 
gratitude to — Appreciation of poor 

child's gift, 1269. 
higher view of — Copernicus and Galileo, 

1223. 
historic and personal — Pigments for 

portrait, 1221. 
humiliation of— Illegitimacy, 1226. 
ideal of, fashioned by experience — Vine 
formed on tree, 1263. 



Christ interpreter of God's goodness 

Author's experience, 1220. 
judgments of, interior — Widow's mite, 

1245. 
limitations of God in— ^L^n of culture 

in slums, 1255. 
mediatorship of— Not as ambassador, 

1268. 
miracles of — Orator's gestures, 1232. 
name of — Great men associated with 

tlieir achievements, 1260. 
nature of— Painting portrait of opal, 

1222. 
only standard, the — Chronometer set by 

the sun, 1261. 
our hope — Rising sun, 1218. 
peace through — Haven after storm, 

personal Saviour to each — World gives 

poetry to poet, 1264. 
philosophy scorning an invisible — Owls 

and bats doubting sun, 1271. 
l)ower of — Sun on strawberries, 1265. 
preaclied imperfectly yet truly — Shat- 
tered mirror, 1283. 
radicalism of — Physician treats cause of 

illness, 1242. 
soul-house illumined by — Candle in 

window, 1235. 
soul's imaginings of — Beginnings of sub- 
stantial thought, 1266. 
spirit however gained is Christianity — 

Education, 1098. 
sure guide, the — Skilled physician ; 

trapper in the woods, 1262. 
tlie ever-present — Letter from friend, 

1278. 
to be learned — Disciple, scholar, 1648. 
unconfessed — Secret j/iesa/liaiice, 1546. 
visions of — Examples, 1296. 
walking with — Court rccejition by king 

and nobles, 1294. 
youthful eclipse of — Human growth of 
Jesus, 1229. 
Christian activity to continue — Silk-worm 
cocoon, 1728. 
almost a — Bud ready to blossom, 1557. 
and pagan conceptions of God — Sacri- 
fice and lust, 1256. 
a " pattern," ugly at home — Home 

character tells, 164. 
attainment meager — Barbarian's cloth- 
ing, 1657. 
choice immediate — Weights on scale, 

'574- 
development — Opening of Christian 

graces, 1620. 
good-will — Mother of all graces, 1687. 
help at critical time — Wrecked mariner, 

2086. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



559 



Christian kindness spontaneous — Mother 
serving cliild, 1781. 
life begins slowly — School among col- 
liers, 1597. 

conflicts with passions in — Fighting 

heirs to will, 1627. 
discouragements in early — Stream 

to river, 1629. 
enlargement of — Spark, blaze, fire, 

1645. 
geniality in — Newly married wife, 

1579- 
needs concordant faculties — Un- 
tuned violm, 1710. 
requires training — Not eagle but 

pupil, 1662. 
starting aright in — Scion from de- 
sirable tree, 1591. 
swelling in volume — Rivers increas- 
ing to sea, 17 13. 
under various conditions — Seed in 
different soils, 1634. 
to show goodness — Light in the win- 
dow, 15 16. 
training — Harness; violin-learning, 

'633- 

truth for all men — Hotel table, 
1660. 

unity in reform work — Patriotic soldiers 
in battle, 2369. 
Christianity, a divine incitement — Vital 
force in body, 1308. 

aims to save humanity — Not wrecker's 
boat saving few, 2543. 

effects of, manward and Godward — 
Chestnuts on ground and tree, 1742. 

embraces all estimable qualities — Ex- 
amples, 1481. 

fruits of Spirit, however gained — Edu- 
cation: slave, collegian, 1457. 

fruits — Protestant soldiers and Catholic 
nurses, 1734. 

judged by its professors — Embassy from 
king, 1502. 

new efflux of Divine Spirit — Climate, 

1307- 
not stoicism — Drinking bitterness and 

calling it sweet, 236. 
original and improved — Goethe on 

critics of Faust, 2193. 
scope of — Farm develops stone, gold, 

and rubies, 1480. 
true — Lamp shedding light, 1446. 
unconscious preparation for — Young 

artist, 1575. 
without love — Cob without corn, 1776. 
Christians for Sunday only — Intermittent 

fireflies, 1740. 
make Christians — Diamonds ground 

with diamond dust, S63. 



Christians not made instantly — Stamp on 
wax, 1608. 
querulous — No effervescence ; smoke of 

expiring wick, 1502. 
towards heaven and not towards earth 
— Freight train's headlight, 1522. 
Christ's divinity measured by love, not 
texts — Chemist's scales, 1 28 1. 
interpretation of God — Father in family, 

II75- 
love for his enemies — Hen brooding 

chickens, 1272. 
motive man's need — Orphan asylum, 

1280. 
valuation of humanity — Worth of its 

seed, the child, 5. 
Church — Hotel not home, 1284. 

altar and pulpit — Less than home, 155. 
a natural development — Households 

from love and wedlock, 2134. 
and religion — Body and soul, 2166. 

— Aqueduct and water, 2167, 
business of the, not self-preservation — 

The sun, 2141. 
Christian life easiest in the — Walking 

to California, 2087. 

outside of — Flowers amid grass, 

2088. 
— Unfenced potato patch, 2076. 
Christians vary — Not plates in sets, 

2096. 
class feeling in — Madeleine in Paris, 

2099. 
councils and authorities — Presbytery ; 

bishop, 2157. 
discipline with differences — Apple-stand 

and hotel, 211 1. 
enriched by sum of all members — Com- 
plementary natures, 2084. 
examination for admission to — Entering 

academy, 2074. 
exclusiveness — Flowers not soils, 2174. 
for sinners — Hospital for sick, 2090. 
future not in past — Last year crop, 

2109. 
going, decline of — Intermissions in sci- 
ence, 2167. 
good man bettered in — Wilding pear 

set in garden, 2077. 
harmony means concord not unison — 

Nature's variety, 2164. 
improved by agitation — Fever patient 

cleansed by remedies, 2232. 
lack of Christian sympathy in — Hotel- 
lodgers, 2098. 
less than — Christian household, 161. 
life-power needed in — Curative force of 

nature, 2176. 
lineage interesting not vital — Vines on 

the home, 2136. 



560 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Church, making, solf-hclp in — Sofl-shcUcd 
crabs, 2113. 
malcin^ true men the true — Edwards 

on "Tiie Will," 2i6S. 
member, the idle — The worst heresiarch, 

2106. 
members — Travelers over bad roads, 
2071. 

all needed — Bodily members, 

2085. 
discord among — Hospital patients 

quarreling, 2078. 
humblest, may be useful — Stubble 

and mud in log-cabin, 2083. 
imperfect — Cooked fruit not strained 

jelly, 2073. 
" misunderstood " — Barren granite, 

2104. 
sinful men not sanctified — Sick not 
yet cured, 2097. 
niembersliip, duty of — Enlisting under 
Christ, 2075. 

interchange wholesome — United 

States citizenship, 2165. 
untrained — Unmanufactured ma- 
terial, 2105. 
variety needed in — Slice of social 

loaf, 2079. 
with single creed — Dead cut tim- 
ber, 21 10. 
mixed elements in — Caravansary, 2100. 
of future loving not fighting — Flail- 
bearing faiths, 2160. 
partisanship — Passengers on vessel, 

2155- 
poor, members no excuse for avoiding 

Christianity — Citizenship, 1452. 
primitive Christian and Judaism — 

Wesley and English Church, 2133. 
refusing to deal with reforms — Cark- 

lantern, 2358. 
religion to care for the weak — Babe in 

cradle, 2092. 
sacrificing piety to save — Killed man 

and got corpse, 2101. 
servant of man — Chariot, 2102. 
sustainer of Christian life — Vase with 

water for flowers, 2135. 
the true, welcomes all — Astronomy, 

2080. 
unity valueless — All townspeople one 

name, meal-hour, etc., 2081. 
valuable though imperfect — Gold-bear- 
ing quartz, 68. 
vibrates between law and gospel — 

Pendulum, 2245. 
worth of the — Plow needed for wheat, 

tree-trunk for fruit, 2175. 
Churches, all needed — All growth for veg- 
etable kingdom, 2144. 



Churches need excitement — Open-air 
plants, 2124. 
rich, should give as well as get — Fire- 
engine, 2359. 
with fine buildings but small benevo- 
lence — Gilding own chariot, 2361. 
without Christlike members — Light- 
houses without lights, 2091. 

Churchly cant — Religious mask, 2103. 
forms valuable accortling to effect — 
Schoolmaster, 2167. 

Cities, importance of — Nerve-plexus of 
nation, 1012. 
ruin of men under temptations of — 
Parthenon, 2472. 

City, evils of — Volcanoes, 838. 

Civilization high and low — River and 
canal, 987. 

Civil War, approach of — Barometers, 981. 
dissolution of armies — Summer 
storm, 984. 

Classes for temporary use — Passing 
tlirough a wood, 933. 

Colts — Youthful excesses, 60. 

Combative disposition — Unexploded tor- 
pedo, 751. 

Combination of weak units powerful — 
Water from mist to ocean, 2501. 

Comfort in one's own trouble — Widow of 
Gen. Wallace aiding wounded, 256. 

Coming day not now realized — Moses scep- 
tical of vision of America, 2506. 

Commerce, moral intelligence of — Seeks 
liberty, order, industry, 589. 

Common-sense better than uncommon — 
Cake, bread ; artificial drinks, water, 
360. 

Commune of 1871 in Paris — Cat watching 
for birds, 935. 

Communists, iconoclasm of — Barefoot boy 
and stone, 997. 

Communion, the, heart answering heart 
in — Wedding-bells, 2057. 
sinners not righteous invited — Christ's 
supjicr for hungry and thirsty, 2056. 

Companionship in labor — Paul's cloud of 
witnesses, 533. 

Complaint of calling, unmanly — Flowers 
and fruit on other vocations, 580. 

Compliment — Crystallized praise ; proverb, 
947- 

Conceit — Opinion of Solomon, 1397. 

magnifies its own — Flies on lens, lions 

in moon, 761. 
narrowness of — Building-material quar- 
ried from self, 2267. 

Concord not unison is harmony — Nature's 
variety, 2164. 

Condemnation not reformation — Morbid 
anatomy, 2375. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



561 



Conditions of salvation not impossible — 
(ieiman legend, 2257. 

Conduct needs continuance — Ship's mo- 
mentum, 1337. 
tested by God's word — Carpenter's 
straight-edge, 1632. 

Confessed Christianity a safe-guard — Pro- 
fanity before minister, 2089. 

Conflict leading to peace — Medicine, 

2373- 
Congregation, an average— Picture-gallery, 

2334- 
Congregationalism — Plymouth Church, 

Brooklyn, N. Y., 2158. 
Conscience and reason — Organ-pipes and 

key-board, 1342. 
as guide — Shiji's compass, 1345. 

habit of duty — Reservoirs in West- 
ern New York, 1343. 
covers evil and good — Mask, 1335. 
department — For church, not home, 

1338. 
dimming of — Insects on lighthouse 

lantern, 1349. 
finds out evil — Detective, 1357. 
loveless — Square end of a log, 8S2. 
microscopic — Stopping watch to see if it 

goes, 1337. 
no — Man without a dog, 1331. 
on Sunday and week-days — Justice's 

court reversed, 134 1, 
other men's — Driver on the street, 

1344- 
punishes not rewards — Flagellating 

despot, 1799. 
selfish, for others — Convert giving away 

her feathers, 135 1. 
sensitive, a — Musician hates discord, 

. ^333- 

sinning for other sentiments — Lackey ; 
liar ; advocate ; mule ; blank checks, 
1346. 
spontaneity of — Instinct in walking — 

»339. 
sullying of — Scratches behind mirror, 

1348. 
unloving — Ill-loaded gun, 1334. 
works with other faculties — Inquisition, 

1340. 
wrong use of — Drawn sword, 1332. 
Consciousness needed for realization — 

Italy to Austria, Connecticut to New 

York, 1576. 
Conservatives — Brakes on wheel, 440. 
and progressives — Breeching and traces, 

543- 
Consolations of the Bible — Breasts for 

nursing, 1846. 
Constancy of God's goodness — Light by 

day and night, 1216. 



Constitution, native, a permanency— Dove ; 
sunflower, 450. 
of United States, early perils of — 
Caissons of Brooklyn Bridge, 964, 
Contempt from pity — Crow from egg, 

2226. 
Contentment with mortality unnatural — 
Blossoms ; insects, 337. 
poor — Mummies, 419. 
Continuance, hunger for — Frost pictures 

and paintings, 342. 
Conversion — Dawn, 1539. 

a change of method — Using telescope, 

1561, 
and sanctification — Clearing forty acres, 

1594- 
but the start — Convalescence not health, 

1583. 
is aim not performance — Alphabet and 
literature, 1592. 

study of Christian living — Entering 
professions, 1575. 
mode of, not important — Escape from 

drowning, 1582. 
not edification — foundation not build- 
ing, 1617, 
perfection — Instant increase in 

stature, 1588. 
to be reluctant — Quarreling chil- 
dren, 1572. 
quiet — Feeling not soap and sand, 

1581. 
turning aright — Going to California, 

1587. 
violent, not needed — Disciples of Jesus, 
1580. 
Conviction of sin not to be displayed — Ex- 
hibiting sores, 1570. 
without choice — Business vacillation, 
1544- 
Co-operation, divine and human — Sun and 
plant, 1305. 
Holy Spirit inspires to — Captain in bat- 
tle, 1304. 
Corinthians, I, Epistle to, XIII — Bee- 
tlioven's Fifth Symphony, 1944. 
painted cathedral window, 1945. 
Corporate wealth in politics — Lion cubs to 

be watched, loio. 
Corruption dislikes to be meddled with — 
Sodom and Gomorrah, 2364. 
with propriety — Order and cleanliness 
on pirate ship, 1034. 
Corruptors of the young — Spreading in- 
fection, 1402. 
Country rest — Description, 2554. 
Courage, physical and moral or mental — 
Hercules and Socrates, 473. 
lower and higher — Peter, and Joseph of 
Arimathea, 1249. 



562 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Courage under failure — Plants withstand- 
ing autumn frosts, 679. 
varieties of — Pour heart's blood like 
water, fear to avow unpopular belief, 
472. 
Courtesy better than catechism — Seat in 

car, 8S9. 
Coveting — Examples of, 748. 

undue gains — Stock gambling, 749. 
Creation, modern account of, useless in 

Genesis — Optics in nursery, 1891. 
Credit for effort — Reform of habitual 

swearer, 456. 
Creeds, changing value of — Oriental dress 
in Occident, 219S. 
danger of — ^Mortmain, 2186. 
for teaching not discipline — Whip of 

scorpions, 2185. 
not religion — Plows not harvest, 1508. 
worn out — Mummies, 2207. 
Crime, preparation for — Hazael, 1400. 
Criminality, casual and habitual — Pimples 

and bad blood, 1403. 
Criticism, personal — Cat watching for 
mice, 775. 
the habit of — Examples, 776. 
Croalcers — Patriarchs of the pool, 757. 
Cross, bearing the — Ideal description of, 
1726. 
taking up, in Christian life — Alphabet; 
piano-playing, 145 1. 
Cruel views of God by good men — Dung- 
hill bearing white flower, 2216. 
Cruelty of man — Of animals, 82. 
Culture, sellishness of — Burglar and 
householder, 376. 
wickedness of selfish — Gormandizing 
food, 2457. 
Customs restrain conduct — Walls, 1440. 

David, warrior and poet — Bow and sword ; 

shafts of song, 1910. 
Death a beginning of life — Sunset is also 

sunrise elsewhere, 309. 
advancement — Morning growing to 

noon, 311. 
a grade — School to university, 288. 
and resurrection — Sleep and waking, 

202. 
appearing before God — Preparation to 

meet eminent people, 292. 
approach of — Autumnal glory, 286. 
beauty of — The pearly gate, 298. 
certain and uncertain — Hidden sharp- 

sliooter, 289. 
disrobing not for sleep but glory — 

Thanatopsis, 330. 
forethinkings about — Talking with 

friend, 293. 
glory of — Blossom and fruit, 303. 



Death hope in — Maize ripened and 
reaped, 295. 
hour, a hope for — Birds under impulse 

of transmigration, 305. 
house put in order for — Smoke of pas- 
sions, etc., 291. 
is of the body — Railway car the vehicle, 

not the person, 309. 
Jewish view of — Setting not rising sun, 

302. 
not exile for the Christian — Emigrants 

in strange land, 308. 
perfecting — (^old ore minted, 311. 
preparation for — Autumnal foliage, 307. 
repose of — Sleeping child in mother's 

arms, 300. 
river of, bridged by bereavements — En- 
gineers, 306. 
solitariness of — Moses on Nebo, 304. 
sudden, a blessing — Decay or overthrow 

of sound tree by tornado, 313. 
the natural — Clock run down, 296. 
transplantation — Raised under glass, re- 
moved to air, 312. 
vacation — Going home from school, 310. 
wholesome thinking about — Bathing in 
shore-waters of eternity, 290. 
Decisions, critical— Railway switch ; weight 

on scale, 1469. 
Definitions of — Abhorrence, 1379. 
— Books, 2436. 
—Sin, 1381. 
Degeneracy — Downward movement of 

glaciers, 1413. 
Delicacy — Spring in the rock, 409. 
Democracy starts all from same level — 

Trees, 971. 
Democratic self-government — Church and 
state in Europe, 933. 
institutions raise average of mankind — 
Crossing Rocky Mts., 2526. 
Denomlnationalism — Fences, 2145. 
Depravity, doctrine of total, hiding God — 

High garden-wall, 2249. 
Descriptions of — After the Galilean par- 
ables, 1 106. 

— Aspen tree, 2582. 

— Bearing the cross, 1726. 

— Bird nature, 2579. 

— Bodily members, 181. 

— Country rest, 2554. 

— Delight of peace after war, 2520. 

— Elms of New England, 2583. 

— Empire of thought, 1440. 

^Escape from captivity, 1590. 

— Gulls flying with wind, 1618. 

— Ideals of God, Grecian, Roman, 

Medieval, Humanitarian, 1121. 
— Impersonal Gods, varieties of, 
1 1 16. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



5^3 



Description of — Irish peoi)le, 2514. 

— Jewels as spirtual emblems, 2566. 

—Joy, 2441. 

— Mist, cloud, rain, stream, river, 

estuary, ocean, 2501. 
— Morning after storm, 1253. 
— Mountains as curative agents, 

3563- 
— Prayer-meeting, spirited negro, 

and while, 181 1. 
— Stars and stripes, 985. 
— Tide fdling bay, 1748. 
— Trees, 2584. 
Design, greater evidence of — Watch, 
watch-making machine; flower, floral 
system, 1 128. 
Desiring not choosing — Blossoms and 

fruit, 51. 
Desultory action — Scattering bricks, not 

house-building, 732. 
Deuteronomy — Washington's farewell let- 
ter, 1S97. 
Devil, arrows of— Living above tempta- 
tion, 1380. 
tempts the temptable — Plays on tuned 
chords, 794. 
Development, slowness of early — Plant 

germination, 2471. 
Devotion not piety — Fire, food ; mill, 
flour, 1464. 
that must be kindled — Altar-fire, 
1685. 
Devotional exercises net finding Christ — 
Simmering over fire, 1556. 
impulses — Natural, habitual, occasional, 
1685. 
Dictionary — House-key, 1839. 
Disagreement without quarrel — Pruning 

trees, 926. 
Discipleship, shallow — Populace and Jesus, 

1654. 
Discomfort glorified — Rain and rainbow, 

666. 
Discouragement — Mephitic gas, 1730. 
Discrimination among men — Dressing fish 

for food, 940. 
Disfellowship of real Christians impossible 

— Street-lamp in wind, 2159. 
Dishonesty, folly of — Poor bargaining with 

devil, 572. 
permeating — An atmosphere, 746. 
unprofitable — Thievery a hard master, 

7 so- 
Disinterested goodness — Father in heaven, 

1782. 
Dispositions vary — Sunshine, northeast 

wind, 807. 
Disputatious man — Bramble-bush, 745. 
Dissipation increasingly dangerous — 

Whirlpool, 61. 



Distinction between good and bad men 

interior — Not in clothing, 15 12. 
Disturbance the price of progress — John 

the Baptist, 2371. 
Diversity, power in — Fruit on branches, 

not trunk, 2260. 
Divine and human nature — Bee's sting and 

needle, 1188. 
and human sympathy — Helping an 

enemy, 1193. 
comforter, the — Caravan of pilgrims, 

1 194. 
father not avenger — Obstinate parent, 

1 1 78. 
fullness — Man's lamp and God's sun, 

1200. 
guidance a privilege — Coast-lights, 1324. 
impulse of love — Violet's perfume for 

others, 1172. 
intercourse, tokens of — Fruit from 

orchard, 15 10. 
justice as considerate as human — I>egal 

maturity, 1 182. 
law and divine mercy — Pedantic judge, 

loving God, 2255. 
lightening of burdens — Increase of 

strength, 171 1. 
love eternal — Restored blind man re- 
alizes existent beauty, 1 183. 
love for man — Sun drawing forth vege- 
tation, 2571. 
measurement of men— Shakespeare and 

cobbler alike, 1181. 
mercies — Dew, 1 196. 
modeling of man's glory — Sculptor's 

clay-work, 1723. 
paternity — Key to Christianity, 1 177. 
patience — Schoolmaster, 1195. 
truth, human statements — Iron ore and 

forged tools, 2184. 
Doctrinal difficulties — Overtight harness, 

2183. 
discussion — Fence-building not farming, 

2180. 
intolerance — Shibboleth and Sibboleth, 

2189. 
preaching to be practical — Subsoil plow, 

2182. 
Doctrine of retribution taught by Christ — 

Drawing back curtain, 2250. 
of total depravity hiding God — High 

garden-wall, 2249. 
Doctrines and life — Skeleton and body, 

2181. 

truth — Wheat in the kernel and 
bread, 2305. 
old-fashioned — Wagon without springs, 

2227. 
to be proved by trial — Typesetting; 

chemical formula, 2221. 



sH 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Doubt and faith — Horn twins, 19S5. 

chcerlessncss of — Newfoundland fogs, 

1971. 
cleared by times of vision — Landmarks 

for traveler, iyS6. 
eras of — Ploughing for a new crop, 

1972. 
power of — Question of counterfeit coin, 

1978. 
Doubters of the invisible — Bulb's talk 

about flowers, 1696. 
soul bestead by — Unanchoredship, 1981. 
Duty and destiny — Flaw in the weaving, 

446. 
fidelity to — Gardening for the public 

eye, 525. 
shirking, means disuse — Unworked iron 

worthless, 550. 
Dying, act of — Folding of flower; wind 

dropping away ; ebbing tide ; taper 

going out ; spark extinguished ; bird 

seeking its nest, 297. 
ease of — Falling of ripe apple, 299. 
peace of — Tired child falling asleep, 

301. 

Ear and tongue leagued for evil — Sewer 

and scavenger, 792. 
Earth and heaven — Seasickness and 
beauty of foreign lands, 351. 
connection with heaven — Electric key- 
board and organ, 1434. 
judgments in heaven — Invoices reap- 
praised, 317. 
Earthly experience foundations of heavenly 
conceptions — Water for clouds, 1155. 
undertakings should aim at heaven — 
Jacob's ladder, 1599. 
Eating — ^Firing an engine, 180. 

on principle — Fuel proportioned to work, 
1S6. 
Education begins in simplicity — Mother- 
language, 2417. 
changes size but not sort — Tree-culture, 

2412. 
does not originate — Pick-axe and gold, 

2433- 
for great possibilities — Manoah's wife, 

2416. 
in voting by voting — Shooting to learn 

to shoot, 2424. 
mind without — Undug ore, 2425. 
taxation for, wise — Stopping holes in 

ship of state, 2419. 
varies for different children — Bass viol, 

flute, 2418. 
Effort source of power — Hard-worked 

father, pampered children, 593. 
Elect and non-elect — Whosoever will and 

won't, 2204. 



Elevation means efibrt — Going upstairs, 
2489. 

Elijah, irregularity of — Mountain stream, 
1906. 

Elms of New England — Description, 25S3. 

Emotion and motion — Cascade and mill- 
stream, 410. 
deep, not common — Giant chords in 

German castle, 418. 
develops conduct in wedded love — 

Blood of life, 113. 
pernicious if not practical^Theater; re- 
ligion, 1497. 

Emotional extremes — Tides in Bay of 
Fundy, 411. 
natures — Swollen streams ; full reser- 
voirs, 452. 

Emotions soiled by worldliness — Delicate 
blossoms, 1070. 

Energy in strong natures — Quartz-crush- 
ers, pile drivers, 452. 
or mildness of goodness — Cutting edge, 
or October sun ; June sun or moon- 
shine, 434. 
unprofitable — Unbroken colt, 733. 

Enjoyment, power of — Quality of musical 
instrument, 6 1 3. 

Enterprise, commercial, high results of — 
Lamp of science, roots of literature, 
bread of learning, support of religion, 
588. 

Enthusiasm, power of — White heat in 
brain, 869. 

Environment, early — Relic of mother, 844. 
not all — Wayside blossoms, 662. 
superior to — Fine bird in smutty chim- 
ney, 837. 

Epistles, living — Theory and example, 
light killmg darkness, 1509. 

Equality of poor and good workmen im- 
possible — Watering-pot not Niagara, 
2497. 

wages for all absurd — Wheat and 
chaff, 2498. 

Equanimity to be learned — Avoiding sea- 
sickness, 161 1. 

Equivalence, law of — Making haste to be 
rich, 609. 

Equivalents of temperament — Icebergs 
and equator, 378. 

Era for gladness — May, not January, 

2539. 
Error exposed in love or in temper — 

Angels or animals, 2377. 
Escape bom storms of life — Top of Mt. 

Holyoke, 1755. 
Esprit de corps of Christianity — Of army, 

2150. 
Eternal life, promise of — Sun's talk to 

flowers, 1676. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



565 



Eternity, background of life — Sir Joshua 
Reynolds, 314. 

refreshment in thought of — Summer 
bath in ocean, 294. 

to show earthly work — A sealed check 
for payment, ^i^. 
Evanescence of experience — Summer mem- 
ories in winter, 414. 
Events — God's shuttles weaving future 
garments, 2481. 

silence of great — Morning star, 2503. 
Evil, accustomed to — Small doses of poison, 
14 1 9. 

active and passive — Fire and decay, 
922. 

always evil — Spider in morning-glory, 
1368. 

courses, escape from, improbable — 
Sliding down a glacier, 1416. 

disguised, still evil — Harlot, 770. 

finds evil — Examples, 793. 

for the sake of good — Satan's fishing- 
line, 562. 

individual power of social — One instru- 
ment in orchestra, 920. 

insensibility to — Working in gas mains, 
1418. 

mysterious powers of — Shadow of hawk, 

135'- 

origin of, with God — Labor pains, 1 127. 

overcome with good — Children's see- 
saw, 950. 

propagation of — Self-sowing poisonous 
weed, 1424. 

resist beginnings of — Prairie fire, 58. 

strength of, in men — Cable tested by 
stress, 1426. 

traits reclaimed — Sub-draining morass, 

723; 

varieties of — Destroying watch, 1395. 
Evils in society can be destroyed — Hercules 

and the serpents, 2381. 
Evolutionary theory of universe greater 
than creative — Power- loom and rug- 
makers, 2237. 
sublime conception of design — Not me- 
chanical whittling, 2243. 
without, physical research gives only 
unrelated facts — Basket of marble, 
2236. 
Example, force of — River-boom, 866, 
Examples of — Architecture from nature, 
2581. 

— Christ's themes, 2341. 

— Coveting, 748. 

— Criticism, habit of, 776. 

— Evil finds evil, 793. 

— Forgiving without forgetting, 767. 

— Fraud in manufacturing, 774. 

— Frugality under temptation, 69S. 



Examples of — Good things embraced in 

Christianity, 1482. 
— llluslrations from nature, 2547. 
— Lower pleasures : thief, robber, 

miser, reveler, 1393. 
— Luminous hours after darkness : 

frontier preacher, city missionary, 

worker for the world, Christ, 1763. 
— Minister's instinct for men : 

artist, mechanic, drunkard, glut- 
ton, angler, 22S1. 
— Study of human nature : lawyer, 

merchant, politician, iiorist, 2283. 
— Opening the lock of God's will, 

1777. 
— Right, unconscious rebuke of 

wrong, 825. 
— Salutations, ancient and modern, 

808. 
— Spirituality misunderstood, 1067. 
— Symbols in religion, natural and 

artificial, 2549. 
— Visions of Christ, 1296. 
— Voice for orator: rooster, bull, 

crow, dog, 2294. 
— Volition and disposition, 1739. 
Excellences, small — Cochineal insect dye, 

799- 
Excitement, energizing power of — Anger, 

439- 
national — Freshet and good tilling, 

979- 
natural desire of men — Dissipation, 

chase, war, 438. 
of higher feelings — Molten iron in 

foundry, 1553. 
safety in lack of religious — Broken- 
down horse, 2130. 
Excuses flimsy — Frost-pictures on win- 
dow, 1408. 
Experiments in religion — Horse-back rid- 
ing, 1550. 
Explanations profitless — Kitten chasing 

its tail, 894. 
Expression by deeds — Mary Magdalene, 
loSo. 
gives development — Clouds and rain, 

1688. 
increases emotion — Maiden and lover, 

1577- 

of pleasure — Bell, 802. 

safety in — Emotive man in church ac- 
tivities, 2123. 
Extremes and means in morals — Zero : 

cold nor hot, 445. 
Faculties brightened by use — Bodily mus- 
cles, 389. 

condition of, for work — Clear or cloudy 
weather ; astronomer ; lawyer ; doctor, 
preacher, 388. 



566 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Faculties inharmonious — Tenants in lodg- 
ing house, 3S3. 

to be controlled not destroyed — Prob- 
lem requires all its elements, 450. 

to be regulated — Steeds awaiting hit and 
training, 430. 
Fading impressions of good — P>ell vibra- 
tions, 1 105. 
Faitli, activity of Christian — Light, heat, 
2026. 

and reason — Turkey flying and walking, 
2028. 

comfort in Christian — Remedial force 
of nature, 2034. 

deals with the invisible — Merchant 
prince, 2010. 

imaginings of, beautiful — Frost-picture, 
dew on flower, 201 1. 

in God — Trust in the pilot, 2023. 

in practice — Lyman Beecher, experience 
of, 2025. 

is trust — Forest-guide ; ship-captain ; gen- 
eral, 2008. 

lack of, foolish — Children in nursery, 
2032. 

living by — Farmer and apple-tree, 2036. 

man without — Headless fly, 2007. 

not single but universal — Not a diamond 
but treasure, 2010. 

outgrowth of, from idolatry — White 
flower from dirt, 2459. 

steadfastness of — ^Napoleon's marshal 
and the bomb, 2018. 

the Order of, in Hebrews — Peerage, 
2021. 

without knowledge — Poor man and rich 
helper, 2009. 
Fall of man — Never was; but upward if at 

all, 221 1. 
Falling by the way in humanity's march — 

The weak of the army, 2533. 
Fame brief — Names on ocean-beacli, 535. 
Family, a large — Ladder for the children, 
160. 

prayer — A celestial bath, 174. 

unity, of the spirit — Marriage, living 
under one roof, physical not spiritual 
oneness, 166. 
Fate, the religion of — Stream irresistible as 

Niagara, 2206. 
Father and daughter — Home-quarrel 
blocks conversion, 172. 

and Judge — Home and court-room, 
141. 
Fatherhood, the Divine — Parents and 

erring children, 148. 
Father's love attracts the errant — Prod- 
igal's return, 149. 
Fault-finding — Turkey-buzzards and car- 
nun crows, 778. 



Faults, corrigible — Crooked timber, 1650. 
in full natures — Weeds in rich soils. 

404. 
lead to sins — Equivocation and lying, 

711. 
little, hide God — Breath on glass ; pricks 

on shield, 714. 
repeated, dim moral sight — Spider-web 

in window, 713. 
small, baits to larger ones — Trapping 

turkeys, 7 12. 
unseen — Mines under the wall, 721. 
Fear — Bell or gong of warning, 1987. 

— Lash for steed of industry, 1990. 

— Moral tonic, 19S8. 

— Pain of spur, 1989. 
and hope — Twilight and sunrise; miasma 

and quinine, 1997. 
but restraining agency — Bayonets ; hang- 
man, 1991. 
corroding — Secretes acids, 1992. 
deteriorating — Poison, 1993. 
excessive, a hindrance — Water-logged 

timber, 1992. 
folly of — Dreading fords in the West, 

1995- 
Feeling before reason in higher truth — 
Justice, beauty, wit, 407. 
community of — Burning stick, fagot, 

bonflre, furnace, S72. 
great, for great occasions — Battle ; fire ; 

illness, 416. 
growth and diffusion of — Mulberry tree, 

1613. 
in shallow natures — Ripples ; surface- 
plowing, 415. 
law of — Emotion and harnessed motive 

power, 441. 
power of — Mill-streams, 408. 
reaction of — R. H. Dana, Jr., returns 

from voyage, 443. 
transientness of high — Color-excite- 
ment in I^ouvre, 413. 
variability of — Torch-flame, 2132. 
Fellowship, unchristian, to errant church 

members — Cannibalism, 21 12. 
Fervency effective — Apostles; men in active 
life, 435. 
makes thinking and doing easy — Weld- 
ing iron in heat, 554. 
Fiction and fact — Soup and meat, 2446. 

not food — Spices and condiments, 2447. 
Fidelity — Shipmaster in wreck, 820. 

in labor — Silk-worms, 1737. 
Filial liberties attract love — Children 

treating older friend as father, 22. 
Financial disturbances — God's furrows for 

good seed, 2332. 
Find wliat we bring, we — The cinder and 
the lamp, 861. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



567 



Flag, the American — Described, 985. 

Flatterer — Needle threaded with selfish- 
ness, 773. 

Flattery, lying — Thread of truth, web of 
insincerity, 772. 

Flesh and spirit — Cob and corn reversed, 
1065. 
cannot discern spirit — Anger ; peace ; 
greed ; equity, 1062. 

Flowers, love of — Eden in the heart, 

2545- 
Force, interchange between mind and 

physical world — Tides, IO73. 
Forgiveness — Restored stream of confi- 
dence between souls, 16. 
ground of, in God's nature — Generous 

man ; poetic speaker, 1205. 
of God absolute — Destroying indictment, 
1207. 
remedial — Tree overgrowing in- 
jury, 1206. 
surly — Dog rebuked for barking, growls, 

766. 
without desire to retaliate — Burn arrow 
and bow too, S15. 

forgetting — Example, 767. 
Forward, not backward — Swimming 

Charles river, 686. 
Fraud in manufactures — Examples, 774. 
Free agency and God — Oars with wind 

and tide, 2203. 
Freedom, evils of, cured by more freedom 
— Christ and the blind man, 2347. 
more fertile than restraint — Fat soil has 

weeds, 2346. 
of speech — Winds in malarial regions, 

2374. ... 
spirit of, irresistible — Stopping a spring, 
966. 
French esthetics, Greek sensualism without 
mental genius — Swallows and eagles, 
2514. 
Fretting, foolish — Pestered by a fly, 744. 
shows weakness — Little dog at door, 
741. 
Friend in household — Thread in needle; 
sunlight in window, 1274. 
labors for a — God's disinterestedness, 

912. 
talking with a — Forethinkings about 
death, 293. 
Friends, companionship with absent — 

Recognition of God, 1 138. 
Friendship broken — Cracked tumbler, 910. 
in separation — Abiding influence of 

Christ, 1259. 
ordinary — Baxter, 909. 
responsiveness of — Bell, 911. 
self-seeking — Shepherd ; gardener, 768. 
true — Mutual love-slavery, 909. 



Frugality, self-government — Temptations 

described, 698. 
strengthens manliness — Parents not to 

depend on children, 828. 
Fundamentals, sinfulness, love, immortality 

— Atmosphere, power, subject, 2265. 
Future, a thought of the — Unhindered 

social power of spirit-world, 341, 
disclosures of the — Michael Angelo's 

scaffolding, 335. 
joy, a present help — Rejoicing at close 

of Civil War, 334. 
probation, perils of — Circuitous route 

from Greece to New York, 318. 
revelations of character — Carpets in loom 

and in market, 349. 
splendor of the unimaginable — Esqui- 
maux' idea of the tropics, 356. 

Gains, ill-gotten, destructive — Phosphores- 
cence of decay, 543. 
Garden^'parable of Eden — Poem ; desert 

flower ; morass, 2209. 
Gardener and chaplain — Children and 

God's handiwork, 40. 
Generosity and benevolence — Militia and 
regular army, 2386. 
fragmentary, benevolence complete — 

Child and pianist, 2388, 
habit of — Oil on machinery, 2410. 
in the money-getter — Ship's leaking 
seam, 576. 
Genius but the soil — Must be tilled, 394. 
labors of — Ant and eagle ; Ceesar ; Fred- 
erick ; Napoleon, 508. 
needs industry— Bacon ; Michael Angelo, 

507. 
not to be suppressed — Germ will burst 

the shell, 372. 
obligations of, to lofty life — Byron; 

Goethe, 373. 
to live superiorly- — ^Eagles and sparrows, 

1518. 
undeveloped — Unlighted candle, 372. 
Gentleness, power with sweetness — 

Blacksmith and baby, 812. 
Germanic free spirit — To arise after Bis- 
marck, 2516. 
Gifts measured by motives — Smart-weed 
and flower, 887. 
of love lasting — Widow's mites; ala- 
baster box, 2407. 
Giving and receiving — Grain sown for 
harvest, 2389. 
freely or stingily — Spring or leaky 

pump, 2385. 
to be done simply — Not like hen cack- 
ling over egg, 2409, 
unwise, makes mendicancy — Italy and 
charity, 2398. 



568 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Giving wise — Vussar College ; Nashville 
Univ.; Wi'llcsley College, 2401. 

with gnuigiiig — Water pumped from 
mine; tootli to dentist, 2390. 
Glory out of obscurity — Huguenots, Vau- 

dois, 657. 
God, an unsympathetic, admirable not 
lovable — Ice])erg, 1134. 

apprehended spiritually — Seeing music, 
hearing pictures, I151. 

as center — Light-rays and sun, 1704. 

as father, as ruler— Verdure clad moun- 
tain, Mont Blanc, 2248. 

central in human affairs — Suns and 
satellites, 1 164. 

comforting, the — Mother soothing child, 

II35- 

conceptions of — Barbarian, Greek, 
Christian, 1 1 13. 

distorted views of — Concave mirror, 
1 1 19. 

gifts to — Children's fruitful lives please 
father, 12 17. 

governmental view of — Indians killing 
weak children, 1 144. 

growing views of — Increasing tele- 
scopic power, 2014. 

human judgments of — Ant and moun- 
tain, 1120. 

hunger and thirst for — Worship not 
enough, 1117. 

ideals of — Grecian ; Roman ; Medieval ; 
Humanitarian, 1121. 

immanence of — Mind in body, 1129. 

impersonal, unlovable — Varieties de- 
scribed, 1 1 16. 

interpretation of — Throne of iron ; crys- 
tal ; mystery ; grace, 12 19. 

interrogated Ijy intelligence — Potter and 
clay, 1 1 26. 

knowledge of, growth not impression — 
Photographic j^late, 1060. 

known by love — Summer's warmth, 
1 107. 
through man's best qualities — 
Music ; heroism, 1 154. 

longing for — Potato-vines in cellar, 1088. 

love for an unknowable — Morning- 
glory twining on shadow, 1 1 14. 

loves as men need — Seeking mission- 
school children, 1215. 

making use of — Different effects of sun- 
shine, 1 169. 

not a self-flatterer — Nebuchadnezzar, 
1 156. 

of law, a — Captious judge on bench, 
1 140. 

originator of evil — Growing-pains, 1 127. 

pantheistic, unsatisfying — Chewing this- 
tle-down, 1 1 18. 



God, partial views of — Lost in the forest, 
1 132. 

passes comprehension — Tyndall's ex- 
periment on ligiit spectrum, 1169. 

personal, fundamental — Love demands 
personality, 1 1 16. 

right to — Fellow - countrymen 
abroad, 1 136. 

philosopher's, not adorable — Proposition 
in Euclid, 1 1 15. 

recognition of — Companionship with 
absent friends, 1138. 

regards all alike — The great democrat, 
1122. 

seeing, through purity — Correct tele- 
scope-lens, 1 1 24. 

seen as he is — Vision of Parthenon, 
1159. 

symbolized in human love — Mother, 
lover, 1 185. 

the mover, man the actor — Water-power 
and mill, 436. 

thoughts about — Drop and ocean, 1147. 

understanding of, grows with experi- 
ence — Child and parents, 1 137. 

universal medicament — Blood of the 
universe, 1 180. 

varying conceptions of — Observers of 
Milan Cathedral, II23. 

working in us — Ante-natal maternal 
sustenance, 1091. 
God's abundance — Light, rain, air, 1191. 

beneficence — Mother and babe, II31. 

bosom — Mothering tired children, 1201. 

brooding love — Eagle in the nest, 1089. 

children not forgotten — Mother's heart, 
1 108. 

com])anionship not provable — Man's 
love for his wife, 2012. 

creation of unsalvable evil men — 
Spreader of smallpox, 2213. 

dealings with men — Sculptor with mar- 
ble, 1643. 

delicacy towards the repentant — Tran- 
quil skies not brooding storm, 1202. 

discipline — Author's days of boy whip- 
pings, 1 192. 

disinterestedness — Labors for friend, 
912. 

emotion — Greek and Hebrew concep- 
tions of God, 1 21 3. 

generosity — Thousand-dollar bills and 
small ones, 12 14. 

glory — Moses and God's goodness, 1 176. 

goodness waits for men — Miners find 
light above, 1 184. 

government — Right and wrong its pil- 
lars, 1 133. 

gracious bounty — Sun and blossoms, 
1 1 90. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



569 



God's great heart — Tlie ocean ; a cup, 
1 198. 

heart man's standard — Chronometer, 
1 170. 

heirs not poor — Wealthy traveler loses 
letter of credit, 709. 

influence on man's development — Sun- 
light on plant, 1 125. 

kingship — Best monarchs, not worst, 
the criterion, 1179. 

knowledge of all experience — Young 
mother and grandmother, 2020. 

love for his children — Bird plucking 
breast-feathers, earthly fathers, 1 140. 
to his world — Mother-soul, 4. 

personality known by love not analysis 
— Eating a peach, 1141. 

rejoicing over rescued souls — Lost and 
found on the prairie, 1158. 

severe dealings — Digging well ; sinking 
mine-shaft ; threshing with flail ; rot- 
ting flax-fiber, 677. 

spirit, attraction of — Sun's evaporation 
of sea, III I. 

sympathy — Mountain echo, 1173. 

tenderness for the weak — Babe rescued 
in conflagration, 1186. 

unselfish life — Centrifugal not centrip- 
etal, 1 1 49. 

love — Cold marble throne, or blaz- 
ing with love, 1 1 39. 

willingness to give — Apple-tree, 1174. 
to help — Man glad to advise friend, 
1832. 

will on earth and in heaven — Orchestral 
tuning and performance, 1187. 

words heard by his children, — A touch- 
stone, 1067. 

writing legible — Marks of passions, 

57- 
Golden mean in property — Temperate 

zone, 591. 
Good-bye — " God be with you," shrunk 
to a skin, 808. 
deeds — Dewdrops ; pearls, 15 17. 

one's own, to be forgotten — Wor- 
shiping one's own shadow, 1785. 
for evil as coals of fire — Consuming 

offences on altar, 1797. 
growth, slow growth — Mushroom and 

tree, 16 16. 
in every man — Eat the fruit, not whole 

tree, 447. 
men opposing hopeful views of God — 

Backing into heaven, 2218. 
nature evident — Fragrance of grape- 
vine blossoms, 806. 

influence of — Daylight, 860. 
works for growth not contentment — 
Sails not anchors, 1626. 



Goodaess amid evil — Lighted candle out- 
doors, 814. 

artistic — Fine-finished cutlery, 461. 

effluence of — Fragrance of hidden 
flowers, 1072. 

everyday — Flowers, 1504. 

influence of visible — Flowers and bot- 
any, 1503. 

made apparent — Mignonette, 1521. 

multiplies — One rose demands another, 
1671. 

needs divine nourishment — Seed grow- 
ing, 1690. 

not of sudden growth — Fruit not ripened 
by fire and bellows, 1607. 

not to shun the world — Plague-stricken 
district, 544. 

to be positive — Palette of rich colors, 
1749. 
Gospel, irregularity of stories — Not dis- 
sected map but index, 1920. 

leveling tendency of — Liliputians and 
Brobdignagians, 970. 

life of Christ to be read entire — Tribune 
or Times, 19 19. 

of St. John, New Testament without — 
Golden candlestick with unlighted 
candle, 1937. 
Gossip malicious — Mosquitoes and gnats, 

785- 
Grumbling — Small change of treason; 

Noah's raven, 756, 
Guidance human and divine — Weather- 
cocks and their upright rods, 2015. 
Government, civil, a natural development 
— Clothing ; shadow, 956. 
fits the people — Hooded blossom, 957. 
Grace, free — Generosity of sunlight, 1189. 
God's — Mother and sucking babe, 
1152. 
Grant's fame — Brooklyn bridge-towers, 

988. 
Grateful natures — Grape-blossom ; mi- 
gnonette ; honeysuckle, 1094. 
Gratitude an inspiration — Bailed culprits 
kept faith, 8 19. 
as motive power — Child rescued from 

fire, 1095. 
discoveries of — Magnet with iron in 

sand, 1096. 
everyday — Bells in Antwerp cathedral 
spire, 1097. 
Great experiences and minor events — Mat- 
terhorn and smaller peaks, 1756. 
man influential — Distributes himself, is 

buried, lives again, 2437. 
men associated with their deeds — The 

name of Christ, 1260. 
mindedness in humble callings — Henry 
Wilson; Hugh Miller, 511. 



570 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Great minds stimulative — Paul ; Shake- 
speare ; Bacon, 2438. 

Greek genius without morality — Moral 
rottenness destroyed cohesion, 2513. 

Greed, empty— Sculpin, 575. 

soul destroying — Chords of harp broken, 
581. 

Grief to be recalled only for courage — 
Spent eggs will not hatch life, 251. 
girds in unexpected places — Harness and 
pads, 682. 

Gross measurements of value — Flowers 
not practically useful, 2564. 

Growth of man variable — Seed-growth al- 
most invariable, 74. 

solidified — Rhododendrons, 1702. 

Grudge, holding a — Raking up embers, 
765- 

Habit, beauty of — Beau and farmer ; plow 
and society, 835. 
of doing good — Atmosphere of life, 
1520. 
Habits formed in childhood — Colors dyed 
in the wool, 12. 
bad, eradicating — Grubbing up black- 
berry bushes, 724. 

hard to change — Tree grown 

crooked, 62. 
release from — Prison doors and 

shackles broken, 1432. 
pertinacity of — Chickens and swine 

in low-built houses, 725. 
revealed — Lanced by chance sen- 
tence, 710. 
Half-truths, lies — Throwing shadows, 719. 
Happiness, from within — Harp, oak, 490. 
from health — Plants outgrow aphides, 

493- 
interior not external — Decorated violins, 

488. 

made manifest — Flame from coals of 
hickory fire, 497. 

making — Phosphorescent ship's wake, 
502. 

not having but being — Chords respon- 
sive to joy, 496. 

not to be hunted — Butterfly chasing, 489. 

the highest, under great sorrow — Wine 
from the crushed grape, 254. 
Happy, makmg others — Adagio from Bee- 
thoven's Symphony, 803. 
Hardness in life, enduring — Recruit in 

army, 692. 
Hardship, early, good fortune — Arctic 
fowls. New England, Sinai, 655. 

makes strong men — Puritans, steel-forg- 
ing, 656. 
Health — Mainspring of civilization, 178. 

a man of — A fountain, 177. 



Health, degrees of — Under-shot and over- 
shot wheel, 183. 

depends on activity — Pure water, clean 
air, 179. 

duty of preserving — Inherited estate, 
182. 

gone — A beached ship, 196. 
Hearing, habits of— Sentinels awake to 
evil, 794. 

of evil — Bolting-cloth catches bran, 795. 
Heart associations of life — Seeds wind- 
sown, 843. 

belief with the — Milton and mathe- 
matics ; Tennyson and microscopy, 
403. 

desires of the worldly — Murmurs of 
the sea, 1106. 

eloquence of the — Aristotle ; Plato, 
Bacon, 2270. 

gifts of the — Flowers from garden, 801. 

God found through the — Old colored 
man, 1477. 

uses the head — Man looks through 
field-glass, 405. 
Heaven, " abundant entrance " — Ancient 
victor's triumph, 325. 

conceptions of, from earthly experience 
— Titian's pictures and their pigment, 
324. 

earthly conditions forgotten in — Freshet 
escaped, 348. 

earthly preparation for — Emigrant's out- 
fit, 323. 

equivalent theory of — Weighing sugar 
and coffee, 1467. 

in the heart — Blind man in Louvre ; 
deaf man amid music, 332. 

sickness — Homesick child at school, 

319- 
standard for earth — Tuning-fork, 1754. 
Heavenly joys, intimations of — Faint, far 

music, 323. 
growth to complete earthly — Vine in 

Labrador and further south, 328. 
reward — cup of cold water ; wells in the 

desert, 340. 
the earthly and the — Harvested grain, 

next crop, 339. 
things revealed but not understood — 

Sunlight on stone, 323. 
view of earthly dangers — Tree like man 

with gun, 1996. 
vision, the — Birds cleaving the air, 1764. 
welcome — Watchman not asleep, 326. 
Hebrews, epistle to, eleventh chapter — 

Picture gallery, 2459. 

not Paul's language — Choctaw not 
English, 1947. 
though imperfect, to be thanked for 

Bible — Sea with mud at bottom, 1879. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



571 



Heedlessoess, poor thinking — Bungling 

use of fine tool, 727. 
Help better than almsgiving — The tramp 
beggar, 2408. 
time for Christian — Gambler trying to 
reform, 1559. 
Helpers, humble — Little girl taking dinner 

to workman, 522. 
Heredity, the child's start in life — The 
thief; the drunkard; the godly, 41. 
derives from more than the parents — 

Natural bent to be heeded, 50. 
to be more studied — Goods well-bought, 
half-sold, 2464. 
Helpfulness, mutual — Bearing one an- 

ollier's burdens, 884. 
Hereafter, the — Fledged eagle free from 

nest, 347. 
Heresy, the worst — Idleness in the church, 

2106. 
Hero worship — Kossuth in New York, 

1047. 
Heroism, inspiration of — Joan of Arc, 1058. 
lesson in — The Chicago fire, 2540. 
moral quality of — Early schools of paint- 
ing, 462. 
unselfish — John Brown, 1778. 
Holiness, beauty of — Rose, 1505, 

expressed in face — Cosmetic, 153 1. 
Holy Ghost, the sin against — Dissipation 

of bodily forces, 81. 
Holy Spirit and man — Individual blossom 
under sunlight, 129S. 

man's spirit — Engine and sails, 

1311. 
new birth — Falling in love, 1299. 
the Church — Science and the hus- 
bandman, 13 1 2. 
cause of higher life— Atmosphere, 1318. 
direct inspiration of, indistinguishable — 

Reading of authors, 1302. 
fruits of, various — Peach and partridge- 
berry, 1321. 
general but specially used — Raising 

black IIaml)urg grapes, 1316. 
guidance of — North star to escaped 

Southern captive, 1328. 
in man mightier than world forces — 
Growing roots, 13 14. 

every soul — Summer in each grow- 
ing thing, 1317. 
inspires to cooperation — Captain in bat- 
tle, 1304. 
reconciles condemnation and hope — 

Pendulum, 1310. 
required for spiritual life — Archer and 

mark, 1309. 
ripening power of — Fruit, nations, indi- 
viduals, 1320. 
stimulus needed — Instructor, 1302. 



Holy Spirit to be intelligently utilized — 
Farmer; florist ; summer, 1319. 
to human hearts — Sun to flowers, 

1297- 

universal but specialized — Sunlight and 
window, 1315. 

works through human spirits — Vision 
through window, 1 3 13. 
Home, bad temper at — Aphides killing 
plants, 169. 

use of tongue at — Smoky fireplace, 
168. 

blessings radiated — Candle in window, 
163. 

built by heart — Jiird finishing nest, 
126. 

character tells — "Pattern Christian" 
ugly at home, 164. 

happiness to be shared outside — (jiving 
away flowers, 176. 

happy when humbly begun — Author's 
experience, 157. 

influence keeps hold — Reeling in by 
love-lines, 156. 

is the family — House-building and home- 
making, 158. 

life the test of character — A home pic- 
ture, 162. 

peace bought with a price — Vigils, tears, 
strivings, 159. 

ruined by evil temper — Seducer, 171. 

selfishness — East wind, 167. 

training gets what it gives — Good and 
evil beget their kind, 138. 
Hope, a firm — Steady anchor, 688. 

and conscience — Diet for fatness or 
leanness, 2003. 

faith for use — Bright armor without 

fighting, 1528. 
patience — Candle and candlestick, 
1998. 

cures weariness — Blue spot in stormy 
sky, 1999. 

experience and — Hope indefinite, ex- 
perience defines, 2001. 

in faint beginnings — Recovering from 
drowning, 15S4. 

reason for, in susceptibility to the Di- 
vine — Photographer's plate, 2002. 

splendor of, for the world — Bright hori- 
zon after storm, 2544. 

without, most miserable — Bug on leaf, 
2004. 
Horizons, widening, of life — Art of music, 

1669. 
Household, and education of children — 
More important than church, altar, or 
pulpit, 155. 

a Christian, more potent than — A church, 
161. 



572 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Household made known l)y general elVect 
Fragrance betrays llowers, 165. 

quarrel blocks reconciliation with Christ 
— Father and daughter, 172. 

the motive power — Mainspring of watch, 

'73- 
Human development and Divine inlluencc 
— Harp strings and harper, 1300. 
needs Divine stimulus — Education 
and instructor, 1302. 
dissensions — Panic in crowd, 2473. 
growth from Divine influence — Harvest 

and atmosphere, 1330. 
imperfection — Portrait-painting, 1637. 

in Bible record — Childhood, 2470. 
interplay of, forces — Vapor, clouds, 

rain, 2467. 
larger view of slow, betterment — Evo- 
lution from animalism, 2491. 
life to be developed hereafter — Tropical 

seeds in temperate zone, 327. 
nature right if used aright — Hand, 1563. 
organized for variety — Sense of 

humor, 2188. 
without religion — Overgrown 
forest, 1441. 
soul but beginning of perfection — 

Hicks, portrait-painter, 2413. 
unity generic, variety specific — Apple, 
quince, blackberry, rose, one genus, 
2488. 
work unfinished but continued — Links 
in God's chain, 2482. 
Humanity entire, to receive the gospel — 
Sun shines on all, 2485. 
in trouble — A letter of introduction, 878. 
march of, to self-government — Into sum- 
mer from winter, 2483. 
rise of — Angel and lion, 2524. 
temples of God in — Egyptian and 

Grecian architecture, 2490. 
unitary idea of — Family, not subject- 
race, 1 125. 
upward progress of — Rising of the tides, 
2504. 
Humble beginnings of greatness — The 

Wesleys ; Jesus, 643. 
Humor — Lubrication of life's wheels, 482. 
friend of conscience — Public assemblies, 

1336. 
sense of — Cat's eyes in the dark, 485. 
Hypocrisy — Tree rooted in uncleanness, 

769. 
Hymns — Trumpet calls to sleeping war- 
riors, 2063. 
admitted to heaven — Unlike Hindoo's 

faithful dog, 2070. 
emotional effect of — Wings, 1496. 
writer of great — Richest man in New 
York, 2069. 



Ideal l^cyond the real — Art and artists, 
1043. 
of God enlarging — Architect, builder, 

materials, 1727. 
perfection through [iresent duly — Gen- 
eral and [licket, 17 16. 
Idealization — Child, apple, imagination, 

1045. 
Ideals, danger in lofty — Jonathan Edwards, 
1052. 
false — Unregulated watches, 538. 
growth of — Rising sun, 1058. 
low — Village painter, 1670. 
must be high — Writing and drawing, 

1046. 
new — German painting in Italy, 1050. 
given by Christ — New horizon, 
mists blown away, 1048. 
steadfast — Loving enemies yesterday 
and to-day, 1668. 
Ignorance and education — Chest of tools 
unpacked, 2429. 
dangers of — V^ermin in dark places, 

990. 
invites tyranny — January follows Au- 
gust, 958. 
Illness, as a teacher — Strong man learns 
humility, 214. 
disgraceful or honorable according to 

cause — The temple of God, 217. 
heroism in — Girl of eighteen, 219. 
motherly love in — Light in darkness, 

218. 
no time for resignation — Not threaten- 
ing storm-cloud, but accomplished fact, 
is revelation, 221. 
punishment for violated physical law — 
Remorse in morals, 216. 
Illustration, Christ's method, the low to 
the lofty — Skin connects with heart, 
2300. 
mirthful, related to pathos — Full milk- 
pan slops both, ways, 2303. 
most useful class — Drawn from nature, 

2547- 
rhetorical, for mere ornament — Cloves 

stuck in boiled ham, 2301. 
to be uttered with vigor — Crack of 

teamster's whip, 2302. 
Imagination and belief — The Phidian Zeus, 

1976. 
beautifies homeliness — Heart-varnish, 

529- 
divinest of faculties — God's messenger 

and prophet, 379. 
stronger than reason — Memories, 2326. 
Imaginings of Christ — Peginnings of sub- 
stantial thought, 1266. 
Immigration — Fertilizing mud of floods, 
995- 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



573 



Immorality inflated into prosperity — 

I'ursting bladder, 543. 
Immortality adds value to life — Bubble 
and crystal, 343. 
happiness of — Heavy earthly tread, 

light heavenly step, 329. 
hope of — The soul's anchor, 346. 
taught by love — Love of mother, wife, 

child, etc., 315. 
things hoped for in — Identity, faculties, 

better conditions, 354. 
things of, beyond thought — Stellar uni- 
verse, telescope, 355. 
unbeliever in — Man with consumption, 
in prison, 320. 
Impatience in personal career — Husband- 
man works and waits, 731. 
Imperfections to be forgotten — Disappear- 
ing leaves and moss, 2000. 
impulses, prompt action on noble — Money 
for worthy cause, 1554. 
to be guarded — Body tends to obey 

mental suggestion — 365. 
towards Christian life — Less wind, more 
sails, 154S. 
Incarnation of God in Christ — Father to 
children at school, 1 288. 
second, the — Brain controlling entire 
body, 1293. 
Independence in Christian work — David 

with the sling, 2108. 
Indian independent, negro dependent — 

liamlioo and vine, 2518. 
Indifference and unbelief — Sahara, 1970. 
to God — Niagara Falls unappreciated, 
1087. 
Indirect guilt — Neglect of fire-alarm, 730. 
Individuals and communities — Water-drop 

and ocean, 874. 
Indolence breeds morbidness — House un- 
occupied, 372. 
corrupts the mind — Bad air and dust, 530. 
is poisonous — Stagnant water, 726. 
Indolent man ready for temptation — Prairie 

and seeds, 1377. 
Industry, needed by genius — Bacon; 
Michael Angelo, 507. 
the law of success — Arabian Nights not 
New York, 515. 
Inequalities of condition disregarded — 

California emigrants, 699. 
Infinity incomprehensible — Columbus and 

the Western Continent, 1130. 
Infirmity not sin — Ignorant transgression 

of nature, 1384. 
Influence, duty of — Orange tree, 857. 
excitation not creation — Kindling fire 

on prepared fuel, 437. 
exerted by all — Flower ; candle ; mag- 
net, 854. 



Influence higher than authority — Ripen- 
ing of fruit, 972. 
independent of circumstance — Jonathan 

Edwards; bird on a bough, 374. 
of good nature — Cloud over the sun and 
daylight, 860. 

indirect, more permanent than 

direct — Raphael ; Moses ; Socrates ; 

Jesus, 2439. 

posthumous — After-glow of sunset, 1750. 

prayer for steady Divine — Sunshine in 

winter and summer, 1759. 
the measure of value — Letter from lost 

lover, 858. 
unconscious — Locomotive sparks, 856, 
unnoticed — Dew reveals spider-webs, 

855- 
Influences, formative, not conspicuous — 

Silent forces of summer, 431. 
Inhumanity, intelligent — Jesus and the 

Pharisees, 883. 
Injury, repayment of — Hurt man cares 

for assailant, 817. 
Insignificant, significance of the — Mosaic 

of Raphael's " Ascension," 2500. 
Inspiration not creation — Original nature 

of Moses, 1306. 
of the Bible — Poetic utterance of things 

lived, 1835. 
power from — Napoleon's music crossing 

Alps, 2016. 
progressively adapted — Garment to fit 

wearer, 2191. 
Institutions, civil, limit power — Fortifica- 
tions, 961. 
valued for effect — Rifle and game, 2170. 
Instrumentalities, test of — Vines and 

grapes, 2153. 
Intellect colored by emotion — Musical 

theme, organ-stops, 360. 
electrified by emotion sees higher truths 

— Love of children, 361. 
Intellection inimical to feeling — Singing 

bird, 1090. 
Intelligence and knowledge — Enterprise 

and wealth, 2428. 
Intensity required in religion — Smoke, 

flame, coal-fire, 2128. 
Intents of the heart — Hidden mosses, 

1076. 
Interpretation of language by life — Joy, 

2441. 
Intimacy, sudden — Wells quickly dug, 908. 
Inventors, benefactions of — Machinery en- 
larges manhood, 2531. 
Invisible growths of good — Sugar in maple- 
tree, 2479. 
visions of the — Distant music, 321. 
Irish people, the — Characterization of, 

2514- 



574 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Irregular habits and immortality — Prairie- 

firc wind-blown, 59. 
Irritable man — Horse kept at livery, 

spurred by all, 809. 

Jehovah, representations of — By Hebrews 

and by Jesus, 1 1 50. 
Jesus and John the Baptist — Conscience, 
faith and love, 1230. 

Mary after resurrection — Name-as- 
sociations, 1936. 

as God — Saviour regnant and crowned, 
1219. 

at Emmaus, wishing invitation — Lamp 
fed with oil, 1254. 

childhood of — Mere seed of manhood, 
1227. 

crucifixion, tomb, resurrection — Thun- 
derstorm, night, morning, 1253. 

death of, foreknown by him — Eclipse 
and astronomer, 1247. 

detached from his environment — Per- 
fume of vines, 1237. 

disciples of — Virgin soil, 1233. 

education of — Old Testament, 1228. 

gratitude to — Thomas Hughes and 
Arnold of Rugby; 1291. 

impersonality of — Subject of great pic- 
ture, 1237. 

in garden-sepulcher — Root of David in 
true soil, 1250. 

knew human nature — Violinist's knowl- 
edge of strings, 1241. 

last Supper discourses of — Fruit on lofty 
trees, 1935. 

leaves Galilee — Along the lake, 1 106. 

life of — Partial portraits, 1225. 

look of — Opal colors, 1234. 

parables of — Not closet poems, but 
creatures of life, 1926. 

without orderly sequence — Pearls 
cast into jewel-case, 1927. 

peaceful presence of — Genial friend in 
household, 1274. 

persons associated with — Magic lantern 
pictures, 1934. 

refreshment of, in solitude — Coolness of 
night to flowers, 1236. 

resurrection of — Dawn from the night, 
1251. 

— Opening of the door of the fu- 
ture, 1252. 

simple and mystical — Parents with chil- 
dren, 1238. 

salvation through — Ferry-boat ; pilot ; 
leader, 1275. 

teaching of — Broadening of river, 
1239. 
humanized by apostles — Dilution 
of strong wine, 1240. 



Jesus, temptation of — Sjjirit of this world, 
1231. 
— Drifted boulder from earlier pro- 
phetic scenes, 1924. 
the guide — Polar star to slave, 1267. 
transfiguration of, and old dispensation 

— Blossom falling before fruit, 1246. 
with Solomon's philosophy — Shake- 
speare with history, 1925. 
Jew, every true Christian a— Not Greek 
and barbarian, Jew and Gentile, etc., 
2082. 
fanatical patriotism of the — Grain of 
powder, 2512. 

— Internal fires of earth, 917. 
separateness of the — Cliildren in bad 
neighborhood, 976. 
Jewels as spiritual emblems — Description, 

2566. 
John the Baptist and Jesus — Conscience, 
faitli anil love, 1 230. 
noble yielding of ]>lace to Jesus — Blos- 
som for fruit, 1922. 
Joseph, Saint — A shadow on the canvas, 

870. 
Joy and sorrow — Bread and medicine, 
1729. 
a part of religion — Provided by Moses, 

487. 
sanctified — Difference between Puritan 

and Hebrew .Salihnth, 499. 
soul's longing for — Cellar-plant seeks 

light, 495. 
worldly and Christian — Melodies and 
harmony, 503. 
Joys, the highest, hardest to get — Honey 
in deep flowers, 1745. 
waiting for us — Birds on the roof, 
501. 
Judgment by law and by love — Magistrate 

and mother, 2247. 
Judgments heedless — Reckless reports, 

779- 
of others not measured by self — Actor 

and critic, 452. 
uncharitable — Soul's judgment-hall, 938. 
Justice, itself simple, becomes complex — 

Alphabet, 821. 

Kingdom of God built slowly — A great 
edifice, 2475. 

sum of sanctified human forces — 
Michael Angelo result of gener- 
ations, 2509. 
Knowledge, getting of, lirings wisdom — 
Apprentice to learn trade, 2231. 
human, fragmentary — Statue marred 

except chin, 2194. 
incomplete — Philosopher's remark to 
author, 371. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



575 



Knowledge, present and future — Geode and 

crystal, 2179. 
to be sought — Not distilled as dew, 513. 
transient — Stairs, 1631. 
variable in value — Gold-ore in crucible, 

2258. 

Labor organizations strong through the 
ballot — Genie and bottle, 931. 

patient under discouragement — Seeds 
watered with tears, 528. 

source of independence — Hebrew child- 
training, 544. 

unions, danger of — Roman idea of the 
state, 930. 

training in — Unsought good, 928. 
Laborer emancipated by machinery — Iron 

and human muscle, 532. 
Language, homely, arouses memories — 

Echo in mountains, 2299. 
Law aims at liberty — Jails and honest 
men, 955. 

and love — Stern father, comforting 
mother, 146. 

failure of the — Authority and love, 1244. 

helps human force — Harness, 954. 

lower, a step towards higher — Hand- 
writing, 2465. 

not religion — Bones not a man, 2256. 

obedience to love and to — Kindly nurse, 
parental order, 2253. 

public — Ramparts around city, 1203. 

simple, and customs for simple lives — 
Pea-brush for pea-vines, 850. 

unpopular — Gun without powder, 667. 

used by Providence — Human manage- 
ment of nature, 2556. 

violation of, surely punished — Wounded 
tree, 190. 
Laws of life generally obeyed — Truth-tell- 
ing and lying, 1037. 

nature universally distributed — Nerve- 
filaments, 1384. 
Laziness gets no premiums — Sowing and 

gathering, 504. 
Learning God's nature — Sacrifice for 
friend, 1790. 

sudden — Superficial gilding, 2434. 
Lenten intermission of sin — Truce with 

enemy, 1410. 
Liberty in religious thinking — Matters 
civic, 2225. 

needs means of activity — Steam and en- 
gine, 963. 

not dangerous — Learning and intelli- 
gence, 960. 

obedience to law — Factory-operative, 
78. 

of amusements, American and European 
— Discordant, looo. 



Liberty, vital force of — Planted seed, 965. 
Lies hacked by a truth — Blade and handle, 
718. 

cannot face truth — Burrow ; veil ; pre- 
tend to be truth, 825. 

little, dangerous — Emery destroys sur- 
face, 717. 

told to children — Thick as cloves in a 
ham, 20. 
Life — An art ; a trade ; a profession, 927. 

active, liable to errors — Full bucket 
spills, 404. 

a march — Unsettled pilgrims, 549. 

an education — University, 1466. 

complexity of — Melody and harmony, 
382. 

effects of, on the soul — Motion affecting 
universe, 357. 

fruitful — Tree dropping ripe apples, 1530. 

imperfection of — Badly played Bee- 
thoven Symphony, 457. 

inactive, low grade of — Savage, a leaf 
on a stream, 551. 

increases vision — Payson on deathbed, 
1694. 

inspires life — Revivals of religion, 891. 

in this world unfinished — Ungathered 
watch-parts, 2477. 

inward, the — Watch-spring, 1066. 

joy of the new — Sunshine after cloud- 
shadow, 1600. 

knowledge of evil — Volcano crater, 
1366. 

lower, enriched by higher — Broad- 
leaved plants, 1697. 

unsatisfying — Plate not food, 1699. 

need of another — Petty robberies by 
trouble, 350. 

of man associated with nature — Old 
trees, 2578. 

on too low a plane — Houses wrecked in 
river-floods, 685, 

outward and inward — Medieval Jew, 
1286. 

soul, hidden — Cryptic knowledge in 
books, 1069. 

the good, the bad — Beautiful edifice, 
burned districts in Charleston, 83. 

time for kind words — Flowers on coffin, 
805. 

transitoriness of — Summer and autumn 
foliage gone, 501. 
Life under difficulties — Voyage in half- 
built ship, 2474. 

upper and lower — Lombardy poplar, 
1680. 

with and without religion — Fertile land 
in winter and spring, 1442. 
Light, inward and outward — Sacred lamp 
in temple, 1712. 



57f> 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Lincoln's death, effect on government — 
Pyramid, 982. 
name — On roll of immortals, 983. 
Literature, humanization of — English and 
French writings, 2456. 
sensual school of — Mephitic bubbles 
from mud, 2452. 
Live, learning to — New machinery, 1623. 
Living aright, difficult — Lighted torch in 
wind, 839. 
a feat of balancing — Cable- walker over 

Niagara, 540. 
beyond malice — Mob attacking wrong 

house, 660. 
complexity of — Organ-playing, 1689. 
soul's material for enduring work — 
Spiritual labor immortal, 535. 
Long-suffering — Castle, joy within, storm 

without, 694. 
Looks remembered — Heat lightning at 

evening, 1234. 
Lord's Prayer crystallization of other 
prayers — Brightest gem of devotion, 

1933- 
Losing and finding — God's harvesting 

gleans all losses for us, 352. 
Losses, acceptance of — Heroes of adver- 
sity, 640. 
earthly, insignificant — Mr. Astor's pocket 

picked, 708. 
material and spiritual — Soul-bankruptcy, 

703- 
profitable — Smelting of quicksilver ore, 
707. 
Lost cares precious — Children departed, 
260. 
and found — Abyss and safety, 1470. 
souls — Lost sheep, 1 562. 
Love above all — Seraph winged by Faith 
and Hope, 1800. 

and hatred — Rainbow and storm- 
cloud, 1780. 

justice — Grateful beneficiary and 
hired servant, 2252. 
beareth all things — Traveler in storm, 

829. 
believeth all things — Cavour and new 

diplomacy, 1771. 
chastening for cure — Surgery, 144. 
Divine, in the soul — Tide filling bay, 

1748. 
enthusiasm of — Dog; St. Paul, 1789. 
falling in — Holy Spirit and new birth, 

1299. 
God AND neighbor — AND, inseparable 

rivet, 1468. 
grows with years — Development of 

seasons, 108. 
in God, productive — The summer sun, 
1 199. 



Love, in heart to abound — Small flame 
blown out; large, increased, 1642. 
justice — Mother punishing child, 

1208. 
Saviour and in Paul — Atmosphere, 
new inspiration, 1774. 
key to God's will — Opening lock, ex- 
amples of, 1777. 
law of, smitten by Christ to gush for 

poor — Man, not institutions, 1798. 
lightens labor — Hospital work for pay 

and for son, 135. 
measured only by love — Worth of a 

month's work, 115. 
not to be occasional — Arrow at special 

target, 1775. 
of enemies — Spring and frozen ground — 
1772. 
God to man j)rophecy of grandeur 
— Stalk, leaf, blossom, 2487. 
omitted — Band playing cymbals only, 

1795- 

persistence of — Faithless husband, faith- 
ful wife, 1788. 

power of — Sword and wreath, 1148. 

primal source of — Parental instinct, 136. 

punitive and healing — Sinai and Cal- 
vary, 140. 

seeks the low — Teacher cares for the 
dull, 1770. 

spontaneous — Sun coloring objects, 
1794. 

supreme — Cathedral tower and spire, 
1766. 

teaches immortality — Mother, wife, 
child, etc., 315. 

temporal, is temporary — Fresco in 
water-colors, 175. 

the atmosphere of growth — Sun's lieat 
and light, 1604. 

the one thing needful — Mainspring of 
watch, 1 79 1. 

to be manifested — Alabaster box broken, 
805. 

tokens — The white stone, 353. 

transforming selfishness — Maiden be- 
come mother, 1602. 

unselfish, for Christ — Child for parent, 
1784. 
Lovers, true — Concordant parts of music, 

lOI. 

Love's anger — Thunder of summer shower, 

145. 
Loving kindness — Inexhaustible water- 
spring, 1793. 

necessity of — Heathen idolatry, 

17S7. 

Luminous hours after darkness — Frontier 
preacher ; city missionary ; workers 
for world, Christ, 1763. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



577 



Malign feelings cured liy oppositcs — Anger 

and good-nature, 949. 
Man, a " ruined " — Property not vital pos- 
sessions, 702. 

building, a slow process — Construction 
of house, 247S. 

capacity of, for growth — Here in pots, 
other life freely, 2492. 

chaotic incompleteness of — Building an 
organ, 2486. 

grandeur of — Surpassing greatness of 
sculptor making image of man, 72. 

hater, no Clod-lover — Serpent in soul, 
1796. 

in (iod's likeness — Candle-flame and 
sun, 1114. 

is mind — The body his tool-chest, 506. 

judged by general aim — Generous com- 
radeship in evil, 1033. 

measured by goodness — Animals by 
special superiorities : swine ; oxen ; 
dogs, 71. 

needs God — Branch and vine, 1017. 

perfecting slowly — Baking bread for 
hungry child, 2460. 

possibilities of— Timber in acorn, 2430. 

susceptible of cultivation — Fruits and 
flowers, 75. 

the real — Corn: stalk, husks, kernel, 696. 

views of, human and divine — Cater- 
pillars; spark of eternal life, 2527. 

voluntarily advancing with creation — 
Spreads sail to help current, 2542. 
Manhood, beautified by love — Earth's at- 
mosphere, 1485. 

ideal, complicated — Babbage's calcu- 
lating machine, 80. 

of — Not cathedral but elm, 1042. 

the beauty of man — Greek statues, 79. 

true, strong while suffering — Stoic and 
Christian, 87. 
Manners often superficial — Color and shell 

of dead thing, S48. 
Man's access to God — As on angel's wings, 
1 142. 

complexity of nature — Cathedral organ, 
3S1. 

cruelty — Surpassing that of animals, 82. 

higher nature unfruitful — Mont Blanc, 
1650. 

ignorance, God's providence — Napoleon 
and his marshals, 2033. 

ineptness — The pickets and the gate, 

541. 

need measure of God's love — Physician 
for the sick, 1212. 

perfection by growth, the idea of cre- 
ation — Puppet made perfect origi- 
nally, 76. 

variability — Unlike seed-growth, 74. 



Man's varied aspects — ^Tree, to the lumber- 
man, poet, botanist, etc., 77. 

Manufacturing deceit, robbery — Baron; 
pirate ; king, 101 1. 

Many-sided temptations — Whole armor of 
God, 1691. 

Market and church — Wall Street and 
Trinity, 539. 

Marriage in discord — A sulphurous match, 
104. 
of counterparts — Isaac and Rebekah, 

116. 
permanent, according to Jesus — School 

of life, 123. 
for this world, not the other — Flower 
calyx and seed, 125. 

Marriages, early and late — Twining vines, 
iron columns, iii. 
uncertainty in — Lottery, 118. 

Material improvements Christian — Wheel- 
barrow, wagon, 2466. 

Meanness repulsive — Toad, horned snake, 
942. 

Meditation, empty — Mill without grist, 386. 

Meel( to inherit earth — Dove among hawks, 

1773- 
Meelcness, benevolent bearing of evil — 
Poisoned darts of malice, 1752. 
coming triumph of — Advance of spring 

and summer, 1779. 
harmonized power and peace — Foun- 
tains of influence, 1 100. 
not mere unprovokableness — No discord 
from slack string, 175 1. 

selfish endurance — Politician, mer- 
chant, 1752. 
positive patience under provocation — 

Pelting storm, 816. 
quiet power of — Lofty mountain ; Christ, 

'753- 
Men need other men — Many sticks for a 
fire, 876. 

put forth individual nature — Trees, 
2274. 

ready to be helped — After battle of 
Solferino, 2480. 
Mercy attribute of Divinity — Nourishment 
and cordial for helpless, iioi. 

not surly — Threatening dog, 823. 
Merrymaker and his soul — Fiddling ship- 
master and wreck, 1406. 
Mind force and muscle-force — Jacob and 
Esau, 370. 

growth of, transitory — Bud, blossom, 
fading, 380. 

hunger — Yankee driver's curiosity, 369. 

ownership — Enjoyment of others' gar- 
dens, 2552. 

servants, insubordinate — Unfaithful con- 
fidential clerks, 466. 



578 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Mind sliouKl (loiuiiuUc — Bodily disteinpeia- 
ture under pain, 364. 

temperaments of — Body, sensitive or 
tough, S27. 

work at night — Lamp fed by student's 
marrow, 392. 
Minister as paid oiiticial — Bank teller, 
2309. 

careless behind barreled pulpit — 
Country horse at hitching-post, 2297. 

hunting a position — Hen finding roost- 
ing-place, 2307. 

instinct of, to love men — Artist ; me- 
chanic ; drunkard ; glutton ; angler, 
22S1, 

must know man — Surgeon, not instru- 
ment-maker, 2282. 

not preaching all he believes — Hospital 
diet discriminated, 2344. 

the best, the most helpful — Best fisher- 
man, most tish, 2315. 

study of human nature by — Lawyer; 
merchant ; politician ; florist, 2283. 

the young, amidst praise — Inflammable 
garments in fire, 2306. 

unthinking — Hen in a barn-yard, 2293. 
Ministry, sympathy for men indispensable 

in — Marrow, 2353. 
Miracles for early education — Child's 
walking-stool, 2142. 

appear and pass quietly — Floating 
clou J, 19 1 7. 

caused belief in the invisible — Loco- 
motive engine, 1904. 

now unnecessary — Lighted candle in 
daytime, 1905. 

of New Testament rejected — Throwing 
away tlie wheat, 19 16. 

sujiplemental — Donkey engine to ma- 
rine engine, 1903. 

treatment of — Supernatural in Shake- 
speare, 1917. 
Mirtli — Oil better than emery, 481. 
Misfits in life — Trees transplanted in 

spring, 579. 
Missions, city, and churches — Steam- 
yachts and warships, 2093. 

foreign, have best results at home — Old- 
fashioned kicking musket, 2093. 

through commerce — Letters from mail- 
carrier, 2094. 
Mistal(es sharpen men — Grindstone, 399. 

witli activity — Life with steam hissing, 
404. 
Moderation in work and play — Lamps 

with quadruple wicks, 20I. 
Modern increase of fine character — Har- 
vests in Illinois, 2529. 

religious inliuence — Ohio river overflow, 
2177. 



Money crazes more than religion — Harden- 
ing of the heart, softening of the 
brain, 559. 

deviously gotten — Every dollar a lens, 
568. 

getters, emptiness of — Bell-towers with- 
out bells, 577. 

getting, damages of — Generosity calked 
up, magnanimity cut down, 576. 

lovers — Athenians worshiping golden 
idol, 607. 

makers — Philadelphia mint, 606. 

not the man — Warrior's sword, 162 1. 

unused — Reservoir become stagnant 
frog-pond, 595. 

worshiping — Description of money- 
makers, 608. 
Moods, exalted, above care — No dust on 
eagle's wings, 1701. 

pro or con — Tide favorable or opposite, 
422. 
Moral activity needed for vitality — Use of 
muscle, 1606. 

character, beauty of — Music in melody, 
harmony, symphony, 1735. 

danger unheeded — Ship's magazine, 
1409. 

depravity and physical beauty — Fine 
house, bad inmate, 460. 

deterioration — Shabby-growing raiment, 
722. 

disability — Prayers of struggling drunk- 
ards, 1825. 

element, superiority of — Aaron Burr 
and George Washington, 463. 

excellence means labor — Science of 
music, 1649. 

impulse commuted to intellectual idea — 
Grapes to wine, 1151. 

intuition — Perceptions in music, 454. 

judgment important — Thermometer ; ba- 
rometer, 141 2. 

judgments, personal equation in — As- 
tronomer, 454. 

life needs love — Plants and climate, 1769. 

measurements individual — Feeble and 
healthy rose, 455. 

purpose, lack of — Leaves before the 
wind, 1020. 

sense, intuitive and taught — Ulysses, 
Sparta, 459. 

sentiments strengthened by basilar ele- 
ments — Foundation-colors in painting, 

sensibility discovers sinfulness — Plowed 

soil and malaria, 1652. 
training imperfect — Counting of money, 

449. 
truth, earth-view of— Mole and hyacinth, 

464. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



579 



Morality a beginning — W'licat in tlie grass, 
1024. 

and piety — Magnolia stem and blossom, 
1474. 

better than nothing — Rags and naked- 
ness, 1028. 

conceit in— Convicting a fool of igno- 
rance, 1543. 

but partial — Root, stem, blossoms with- 
out fruit, 1026. 

human and divine — Nebuchadne/zar, 
1 156. 

incomplete character — Fair marksman ; 
short anchor; almost a jiortrait, 1025. 

mere — Clean corked empty bottle, 1030. 

moderate — Alloyed gold, 1036. 

necessary to spirituality — Fuel and 
flame, 1019. 

negative — Farm without crops; knitting 
machine, 1482. 

not enough — Foundation of house, 1022. 

root of religion — Cut flowers and plants, 

selfish — Literary epicure, 1032. 
weak, worthless — Mushrooms and tim- 
ber, 1040. 
without spirituality — Portrait without 
head, 1021. 
Morals at home and abroad — New York 

and Paris, 847. 
Mosaic legal details — Cutting the beard; 
blue and butternut, 1894. 
training — Cockroach in the food, 1895. 
Mother, prophetic love of — Sees orator in 
speechless baby, 6. 
memory of — Reverence for woman, 89. 
author's, dancing — Natural gifts to 
be consecrated, 94. 
the typical — The Madonna, 151. 
to lead child in the new birth — Natural 
birth, 150. 
Motherhood, divine slavery of — Mrs. 
Browning, 133. 
forecastings — Ripples of the sea on un- 
discovered shore, 129. 
nobility of — No artist-work to be com- 
pared, 130. 
transforming frivolity to joy — Dew upon 
flowers, 132. 
Mother's ideal and the real outcome — 
Dandelion, 134. 
heart — A well that never dries, 147. 
influence remains — Unfading patterns 

woven, 139. 
memory never lost — Morning star of 
goodness, 152. 
Motive in conduct, grades of — Swimming, 
walking, flying, 458. 
of action, self-portraiture — Sculptor's 
chisel, 432. 



Mountains curative — Description, 2563. 
Mourning for death — No crape for blossoms 

fallen, presaging fruit, 257. 
under sorrow and trouble — Wailing of 

tuned piano, 632. 
Movement upward of the ages — March of 

creation, 2542. 
Municipal prosperity and condition of poor 

— Rich, cream; poor, skim-milk, 1013. 
Mystery of life cleared — Mt. Pleasant 

thunderstorm, 2037. 

Nagging — Darwinian development, not 

claws but tongue, 783. 
Name, a good — Living plant, not in her- 
barium, 901. 

value of — President Lincoln's way, 
902. 
associations — Jesus and Mary after 
resurrection, 1936. 
Names, significance of ancient — Naomi, 

Mara, 1896. 
Nation and the States — Banyan tree, 

980. 
National ailments — Divers diseases, 986. 
Native gifts not measure-standard — 
Twelve disciples and John, 1738. 
qualities to be used — Landscape garden- 
ing, 165 1. 
Natural law and God — Man's body and 

mind, 2555. 
Nature better than books about it — 
Mother's breast, 2548. 
God in — The great cathedrals and 

Peekskill hill, 2568. 
illustrations from — Most useful class, 

2547. 

interpreted only materially — Bee- 
thoven's symphonies but noise, 2574. 

overpowering grace — Grafts overgrown 
by tree, 15 19. 

read superficially — Milton's daughter 
reading Greek, 2550. 

revealing God — Painting by author's 
mother, 2565. 
Nature's balm — Jesus longing for the wil- 
derness, 2585. 

forgiveness, limited — Repentance and 
diet for stomach, 189. 

remedial force — Comfort in Christian 
faith, 2034. 

variety — Church harmony means con- 
cord not unison, 2164. 

wealth to be found out — Discovery of 
quinine, 2562. 
Natures, disproportionate — Unbalanced 
floating battery, 471. 

luminous — Unclouded sun, 1049. 

variable — Clouds and sunshine, 1049. 
Negative goodness — St. Joseph, 870. 



580 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Negro dcpciulent, Indian independent — 
Vine and bamboo, 2518. 
not to be made full man but by growth 
— Not clay and potter, 2519. 
Neglect, robponsibility of — The shipmaster, 

729. 
Nerves, torpid, give small enjoyment — 
Deadness of tow, vibration of rope, 
444. 
" Nevertheless, afterwards " — Golden 

door, 263. 
New aspects of truth unsettling — Malaria 
from new ground, 2349. 
light from single stars — Star of Bethle- 
hem, 2355. 
thouglit wasteful — Plow in field, 2240. 
thoughts not to be preached hastily — 

Cider, 2343. 
truth from single men — John Baptist; 
Luther; Tyndale; Wesley, 2355. 
to be separated from error — Gold 
ore, 2350. 
Newspaper — The pocket- world, 2453. 
carries morality — Arteries for blood, 

2454- 
New Testament— Blossoms from the Old 
Testament, 1228. 
hand-book of religion — Principles of 

agriculture, 1915. 
miracles of, rejecting — Dropping wheat, 

eating chaff, 19 16. 
silences of, impressive — Summit of 

White Mountains, 19 18. 
spirituality supreme element of — Win- 
dows finer than furniture, 1914. 
No — Shield ; sword, 1376. 
Non-fulfillment not violation of law — Po- 
mology and destruction, 1636. 
Nobility compels admiration — Bell must 
ring when struck, 867. 
recognized, not made, by outward hon- 
ors — Kniglithood, 477. 
Nothing for nothing— Studying mathe- 
matics, 516. 
Novels — Whip-syllabub, 2445. 

Obedience to law gives power — Uses of 

electricity, 1444. 
Obstacles to higher life — Rowing up- 
stream, 1692. 
Obstructions to truth — Voltaire, 1974. 
Old age, a lovely — Close of stormy summer 
day, 287. 
approach of — Coming of autumn and 

winter, 2S3. 
beautiful — October, 284. 
early sweetness soured in — Wine ; vine- 
gar. 275- 
good life completed in — Mansion built 
and occupied, 276. 



Old age.hope in — Breezes from otiier world 
over sea of death, 273. 
hope of heaven in — Moses on Nebo, 282. 
losses of — Tree disbranched, 279. 
maturity in, has used life well — Aster, 

277. 
obscuration of faculties in — Lyman 

Beecher, 280. 
scheme of life completed in — Close of 

symphony, 285. 
standards of life degenerated in — Worn- 
out fruit-tree, 281. 
steady character in — Glow of tire after 

early flaming, 275. 
still time for work — Industrial rivers, 

full to ocean, 278. 
weakness of — Caged eagle, 274. 
Old letter, new spirit — Chicken without 

egg-shell, 1884. 
Old Testament indispensable — Early Eng- 
lish history, 1877. 
judged by the New — Joshua's severities, 

1896. 
laws of — Modern police court, 1893. 
literature of — Valleys among mountains, 

1878. 
much of, outworn but precious — Family 

cradle, 1882. 
not exhausted — Flowers and grapes yet 

growing, 1879. 
rejection of — Throwing away gold-ore, 

1890. 
truthfulness of — Genuine child-biog- 
raphy, 1880. 
Opportunity for doing good — Furrows for 

seed, 1520. 
Orator avoids involved sentences — Switch 
with the leaves on, 2298. 
moving men's souls — Musician playing 

great organ, 2290. 
or reader — Organist extemporizing or 

rendering others' music, 2288. 
voice of — Rooster; bull; crow; dog, 
2294. 
Ordination by nature — Four hundred thou- 
sand trumpets no good, 2277. 
Organ church-music and congregation — 

Flood of water and boats, 2060. 
Organized charity — Grinding flour at mill 
instead of at home, 2403. 

danger of — Doing good by ma- 
chinery omits personality, 2404. 
Origin of evil — A cob without corn, 2199. 

with God — Labor- pains, 1 127. 
Original righteousness, man without — 

Without original anything, 2215. 
Orthodoxy and heterodoxy in religion — In 
medicine, 2224. 

Unitarian Sunday-schools — Rail- 
way wreck, 2147. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



58, 



Other=world tliiuking — Author's experi- 
ence of exalted conditions, 2327. 

Outdoor life for health — Dr. Sun and Dr. 
Cloud, 197. 

Outside rough, inside sweet — Chestnut in 
burr, 448. 

Owning of ofTences — Frank confession dis- 
arming, 829. 

Pain, by Divine intention — Nerve sensi- 
bility, 213. 
kindness of — Surgeon setting broken 

limb, 653. 
physical, a moral lesson — Eflfects of 
poison, intoxication, etc., 191. 

teaching of — The stake; the gout, 
etc., 215. 
Painful forethought — Making future chilly 

storm-ground, 2005. 
Paper money in war and peace — Medi- 
cine, not food ; crutches, 1005. 
Parable and fable as teachers — Mother's 

fairy stories, 28. 
Parables of Jesus — Not closet poems but 
creatures of life, 1926. 

often cryptic — Lobes of a seed, 

2448. 
without orderly sequence — Pearls 
cast into jewel-case, 1927. 
Parentage, a goodly — A safe nest, 131. 
perplexities of — Navigating through 

Hell-gate, 143. 
revelations of — Man, not a parent, an 
unread book, 153. 
Parental instinct in men and animals — 
Primal source of love, 136. 
obligation to have sound body — Temple 
or hut for the children, 137. 
Parents and erring children — The Divine 

Fatherhood, 148. 
Parents' task to train, not think evil — 
Children born of the dust, and dirt 
sticks ; not Neros and Catalines, but 
to be drilled, 142. 
Passions, the — Dynamite tubes for blast- 
ing, 425. 
folly of indulgence in — Gypsies in fine 

house, 1398. 
of lust — Volcanic fires, 426. 
power of — Tides; fire; storm, 1358. 
purified — Miasmatic marsh-lights, 1075. 
reformation of, disturbing — Gadarene 

swine, 1564. 
to be avoided — Wild beasts in dark re- 
cesses, 1 36 1. 
Past and future — Grave-stone and sculp- 
tor's clay, 1568. 
not to rule present — Ancient and mod- 
ern plows, 2528. 
the, still exists — Courses of masonry, 65. 



Past victory over the — No longer stumbling 

at (lead things, 1605. 
Patience, in obedience — Results of pruning, 
1621. 
is self-control — Reining in a steed, 420. 
of God with human development — 
Plant-growth, 2484. 
the dull — Crocodile and mosquitoes, 
421. 
trouble the time for — Impending bank- 
ruptcy, 558. 
with incompleteness — Awaiting ripe 
apples, 1678. 
Patriarclis, the, times of— View from Mt. 

Washington, 1892. 
Patriotic, bodily devotion noble — The 

body a living sacrifice, 192. 
Patriotism concentrated and diffused — Pil- 
lar of fire, daylight, 978. 
of Jews — Internal fires of earth, 976. 
Paul, egoism of — /'j thick as spears in bat- 
tle, 1946, 
Paul's " know nothing but Christ cruci- 
fied " — Declaration of Independence, 
2342. 
law of spirit and members — Darwinism, 
2235. 
Peace and righteousness — Concordant 
sounds in symphony, 1747. 
begets peace — Calmness to nurse ner- 
vousness, 818. 
begins in confusion — .Alpine avalanches 

bring summer, 2382. 
delight of, after war — Description, 2520. 
God's dwelling — Cyclone center, 1148. 
of God — Bay filled with the tide, 1765. 
serene joy of activity — Peacemakers 

children of God, 1 102. 
slow growth of Christ's — Rome gone, 
but war remains, 2463. 
Peaceful spirit, the — Scott's " Lady of the 

Lake"; Mercury's shoes, 813. 
Penitence, real, a sure possession — First 

oratorical inspiration, 1640. 
People like priest — Sleepy in church, 2285. 
sources of strength — Tree growing tough 

wood, 962. 
the rising power — Kings gone on pil- 
grimage, 2525. 
Perception trained — Stock exchange ; 

mother at party, 366. 
Perseverance in self-cleansing — Rat-hole 
stopped, 1 54 1, 
in well-doing — Tree with buds, blos- 
soms, and ripened fruit, 1 603. 
to the end — Ascending dome of St. 
Peter's, 174. 
Persistence, lack of spiritual — Pendulum, 
1760. 
of deeds done — Early forgeries, 1420. 



582 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Persecutiun for rij^lUeousness — Invisible 
realm of joy, 659. 
sours some men — Frost sweetens nuts, 

autumn fruit, 670. 
truth bprcad by — limiting thistle and 
barky, 644. 
Personal power — Fire, 862. 

Saviour, a — World gives poetry to poet, 
1264. 
Personality in associations — Father's 
" 11cm! " reassuring frightened child, 

23- 
power of — Wine of being, 868. 

Petty sins destroy character — Moth in gar- 
ment, 715. 

Pharisees, sacred heats of — Rash upon the 
skin, 75S. 

Phases of Christian love — Mother's doing 
for child, 1683. 

Phllippians, Epistle to — Dying voice of 
I'aul, 1946. 

Phrases of consolation lose meaning — 
Hard-worn road, 247. 

Phrasing, power of good — Ubiquity of a 
proverb, 2443. 

Piety in unlikely conditions — Flower in 
rock-cleft, 2143. 
may be partial — Furnace and registers, 

1472. 
professional — Smell of odorous handi- 
crafts, 1527. 
working — Mill-brook, 1506. 

Plans destroyed — Threads broken in loom, 

639- 

Pleasure must make man feel better, not 
worse — Bath, 200. 
of doing good — Mean man enjoys sav- 
ing a life, 2394. 
simple, the best — Dew and rains versus 
storms, 498. 

Pleasures, lower destroy higher — Ex- 
amples, 1393. 

Poesy immortal — Homer ; Old Testament ; 
hymn-writers, 2451. 

Poetic inspiration — Not exhausted in 
Shakesjjeare, 2546. 

Poor^relief to stimulate not enervate — 
English almshouses, 2399. 

Popular discernment of truth — Bolter of 
grain, 2225. 
intelligence — Sap rising in spring, 

2502. 
refinement — Blossoms on great tulip- 
trees, 2494. 
unrest, regulation of — Law in ocean's 
storm or calm, 2531. 

Political elasticity, American — Thorough- 
lired horse, 989. 

Position does not make the man — Apple- 
blossoms and fruit, 49. 



Postponement of the new life — Withered 

rose for friend, 1446. 
Poverty, an evil, unless voluntary for a 

purpose — Moravian missionary, 701. 
l)rimary cause of — Moral and industrial 

avoirdupois, 704. 
sainthood in — Sheaves gathered by 

angels, 693. 
wealth in— Prodigality in abundance,642. 
Power, earthly and heavenly in reform — 

Scientists and moon on tides, 1325. 
Powers, lower, in higher life — Engine in 

the basement, 368. 
Praise, earthly and heavenly — Experts in 

concert-audience, 1092. 
human not Divine need — Joyous chil- 
dren, not parasites, 2059. 
lightens trouble — Psalms of David, 242. 
love of, for noble things — Top of head, 

not bottom, 898. 
songs utterance of inward joy — Author's 

child-instinct, 2058. 
Prayer and self-help — Driving fiery horses, 

1827. 

watching — Divine and human 
power, 1829. 
aspiration of, Godward — Kindling 

wood-fire, 1805. 
communion with God — Sunning one's 

spirit, 1801. 
delayed answer to — Christ and Syro- 

Phenician woman, 1 820. 
for others especially pleasing to God — 

Children, 1831. 
from inward emotion — Wine forcing 

cork from bottle, 1808. 
importunate — Clusters giving wine, 

1822. 
in emergency — Starving beggar, 1818. 
instant in — Not by the clock, 1814. 
interprets God through life — Laying 

train for life to fire, 1809. 
liturgical or extempore — Easiest road to 

heavenly gate, 181 2. 
measured by quality — Not by the yard, 

1813. 
not needing formal address — Mailing a 

letter, 1833. 
of duty — Whipped child kissing 
mother, 18 17. 
the penitent — Knocks louder than 
battle-ax at castle, 1826. 
wicked — Prodigal son, 1824. 
pleases God — Father knows but listens 

to child, 1802. 
resisting answers to prayer — Sick child ; 

sluggard ; drunkard, 1828. 
silent — Incense, 1807. 
spiritual not material — Father cheating 
child with sled, 1810. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



583 



Prayer spontaneous rather than dutiful — 
Son to father, 18 16. 
the Lord's, demands affection not awe 
— Lifts up not breaks down, 1804. 

under pressure — Son asking money for 

debt, 1819. 
universal — Struggles of bad men against 
vice, 1823. 

varied elements of — Orchestra, 1806. 

without ceasing — Education of tendency 
in taste, etc., 1815. 
Prayerful thoughts but weak — Broken 

winged bird, 2006. 
Prayer-meeting disclosures not all — Hand- 
ful of sea-sand ; cup of water, 2118. 

gathering to sit close — Sociable crowd 
at end, 21 14. 

insincere rejoicings in — Miser raising 
flag on Independence Day, 21 17. 

people not to be scattered — Kindlings 
gathered for fire, 2121. 

praying at, to be natural — Variety en- 
riches, 2119. 

related experiences to be the best — Gold 
not dross, 2120. 

speaking in, not to be forced — Home- 
silences, 2115. 

thinkers who do not speak in — Ripe 
grain unsown, 21 16. 

to be warm — Negro and stiff white 
meeting, 181 1. 

woman to pray in — Natural priestess, 
2122. 
Prayers, short — Brief stellar observation, 
1813. 

without thought useless — Multiplication 
table, 1803. 
Preacher a talker — Rain-clouds to make 
crops, 2289. 

in old-fashioned pulpit — Candle in can- 
dlestick, 2296. 

must be himself, not imitation — Song- 
sparrow and eagle, 2275. 

neglecting public sins — Apostle lectur- 
ing on medicine, without cures, 

2345- 
personality in the — Mathematics or 

moral truth, 2272. 

power of a true — Spark kindling prairie- 
fire, 2287. 

real, a genius in moral ideas — Poet ; in- 
ventor, 2274. 

the true — God's mint, 2271. 
Preachers all things to all — Famous woman 
and infant-class, 2284. 

cold-hearted — Callingoff letters of mu- 
sical score, 2273. 

commonplace — Exchange brokers, 2271. 

from other denominations — Fruit hang- 
ing over wall, 2163. 



Preaching adapted to audience — Bait to 
tish, 231 1, 
and practice — Teacher may be wrong, 
doctrine right, 2308. 
public spirit — Dilapidated village, 
969. 
Christ individually — Sun and all flowers, 

1292. 
discrimination in — Remedy and patient, 

2329. 
dull, hides the truth — Window-light ob- 
scured by cob-webs, 2304. 
everyday lay — Artillery, short sword, 

864. 
exclusive — Hospital luxuries instead of 

medicine, 2324. 
God's fatherhood, man's brotherhood, 
includes all — Inexhaustible fairy 
purse, 2352. 
individual — Bunch of needles blunt; 

one, sharp, 2335. 
is emotion and intellect — Bow and arrow, 

2266. 
logical, to the imaginative — Reducing 

clouds to triangles, 2325. 
must be apt for hearers — Spurs for 
the mule, 2328. 
suit its time — Almanacs, 2268. 
not practically applied — Water-bucket 
out of reach, 2331. 
theology — Using, not forging, 
sword of the Lord, 2354. 
of Christ familiar and timely — Ex- 
amples, 2341. 
should include all elements of human 

nature — Great organ, 2310. 
tested by effects — Farmer and harvest, 

1513- 

theological and practical — Dr. C. G. 

Finney and D. L. Moody, 2305. 
through love and fear — Animals trained 

not goaded, 2251. 
to please — Stimulating drinks, 2291. 
variety in — Sun shines onall alike, 2316. 
without imagination — Shutting out 
window-light, 2314. 
eternal life beautiful but futile — 

Moon and harvest, 2357. 
solid thought — Fire of shavings, 

2330- 
Preferring one another — Motherhood 

ideal, 1783. 
Preparation to meet eminent people — 

Death, appearing before God, 292. 
Present and future — Hind-sight and fore- 
sight, 1682. 

— Orchestra in Bedlam, and con- 
cordant, 2507. 
sorrow future joy — Pattern woven in 
loom of God, 225. 



584 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Priesthood, value and i)cril of — ropular 

elevation; class privilege, 2171. 
Pride, men of — Useless leaky hulls, 759. 
sofleneil by love — I'crtile lava-soil, 
1719. 
Principles follow rules — Child-tiaining, 

1630. 
Process and product unlike — Dye-vats and 

silks, 1641. 
Prodigality of God — .World-forces decay 

to make better soil, 2241. 
Profanity, harm of — Rasps that wear oflf 

the skin, 946. 
Progress by generations — Clouds, rain, 
harvests, food, 2462. 
of individual and of race — Earth's revo- 
lution and orbital motion, 2458. 
ujjward, of humanity — Rising of the 
tides, 2504. 
Promises of God as laws of nature — Stars ; 
sun, 2031. 
earnest — Proffered hospitality, 121 1. 
fail lacking conditions — Promises to 

children, 1 703. 
neglected — Plundredpound note, 1209. 
sincere — No under-tow, 12 10. 
to be earned — Child and knife ; harvest, 
2030. 
Proneoess to evil — Cat up a tree ; re- 
versed for men, 1394. 
Property, intangible — Enjoyment of na- 
ture, 2553. 

not circulated — Generates miasma 

and disease, 596. 
manhood — Failing in business, 641. 
Prosperity and adversity — Wax and rock ; 
sun and frost, 627. 
obscuring vision — Summer foliage, win- 
ter view, 620. 
other men's — Giving to beggars optional, 

705- 
perils of — Vines girdling a tree, 611. 

Propiiecy of good time coming — Hickory- 
nut germinating, 2468. 

Propiiet and poet — Birds singing from 
trees and in air, 1053. 

Proplietic visions translated into facts — 
Aurora in brick and mortar, 1950. 

Prophets appealed to imagination — Fres- 
coed wall, 1 90 1, 
spontaneity of Hebrew — Water-rock in 
wilderness, 1 907. 

Proselyting no advantage — Money from 
one pocket to another, 2173. 

Protestantism, principles of — German, 
Puritan, Independent, 2156. 

Proverbs, nimbleness of — Mosquitoes, 
2444. 

Providence and natural law — Wool grow- 
ing, spinning, and weaving, 1166. 



Providence, faulty instruments of — Eng- 
land in hulia; America and Indians, 
994. 
guidance of — Father steering child's 

rowing, 1 161. 
in nature — Weaving of power-loom, 

1 163. 
natural and supernatural — The family, 

1167. 
problems of — Child's understanding of 

parent, 1 1 60. 
rough handling by — Cooper with bar- 
rel, 645. 
superficial judgments of — Chestnut burr 

and nut, 1 162. 
using natural law — Human manage- 
ment of nature, 2556. 
Providences uncompleted — Cactus, 1165. 
Puritans made by hardship — Swords of 

God, 656. 
Psalm, the Twenty-third — Brief opening 
of home-light on winter night, 1908. 
— The nightingale of Psalms, 1909. 
Psalms of David — Silver arrows, 1910. 
Public affairs, corruption in — Worm-eaten 
ship, 1007. 

low standards in — Clock running 
down, 993. 
amusements — American rest ; European 

safety-valves, 999. 
conscience deteriorating — Deceit in 

manufactures, loii. 
life dangerous to young men — Pots- 
herds back of the pottery, 991. 
dulls moral sense — Physical sleep, 
992. 
opinion — Snowstorm, 873. 
spoilsmen — Boils on the body politic, 
1009. 
Pulpit and pew — Trumpeter and soldier, 
2280. 
ignoring reforms — Physician neglecting 

special diseases, 2357. 
influences ; helpful — World-forces, 2338. 

harmful — Worldly pursuits, 2339. 
or platform — Mr. Beecher in an English 

church, 2296. 
politics and commerce in the — Isaiah 

and Jeremiah, 2348. 
theme always spiritual truth — Root of 
the tree, 2340. 
Punishment to be actuated by love — Not 
combativeness with monkey-cap of 
conscience, 1282. 
Purpose, essence of crime — Murder in 
realm of feeling, 1392. 

Quality interior not exterior — Purple or 
drab ; silk or tow, 603. 
in virtues — Pictures; cloth, 830. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



5S5 



Quarreling as a preparation for Heaven — 

Garment, 170. 
Quarrels, how to end — Knotted rope, 764. 
Quick maturity, quick decay — Lettuce, 
1639. 

Rahab from harlotry — Pearl from rough 

oyster, 1948. 
Raillery — Discord for modulation to har- 
mony, 948. 
Reading, sympathetic moods for — Book of 
Ruth ; In Menioriam, 2450. 
with discrimination — Eating the tender- 
loin, 2449. 
Reason — A steed, 1990. 

and faith — Turkey walking and fly- 
ing, 2029. 
sentiments — Key-board and organ- 
pipes, 1342. 
Recreation after work — Sharpening tools, 
199. 
a necessity — Winding up a clock, 207. 
neglected — Violin kept at concert pitch, 

585- 
Refinement, dangers of — Alpine climber, 

377- 

not to be exclusive — Wall ; Sahara, 108. 

uses of — Spider-web ; silk-worm's web, 
849. 
Reformation, critical moments for — Swim- 
ming for shore, 14 14. 

difficult — Climbing giddy cliff, 1366. 

manifests evil — Obstructions in stream, 
1427. 

not immediate — Washing off filth, 1421. 
Reformers, fanatical, bring up average un- 
faithfulness — Thunder-storm, 2380. 

need not be harsh and bitter — Croco- 
diles, 2379. 

once obscure now illustrious — Anti- 
slavery agitators, 2366. 

should respect prejudices — Physician's 
rough treatment, 2376. 

truth of, makes discord with wrong — 
Violins, 2368. 
Reforms arouse disturbance — Obstruction 
in stream, 2367. 

complained of by evil-doers — The plant, 
earth and air, 2363. 

disregard conventionalities — Man's coat 
off" at a tire, 2370. 

disturbances of — Scrubbing for neat- 
ness, 2372. 

ignored by pulpit — Diseases neglected 
by physician, 2357. 

in politics and commerce — Isaiah and 
Jeremiah, 2348. 

of public evil by church — Devil's fire 
and tire-engine, 2359. 

patience in — House-building, 2362, 



Reforms preceded by agitation — Turf 

plowed up for seed, 2369. 
unwisely driven — Dogs excited by ston- 
ing, 2378. 
Regenerated man will live by Spirit — 

Tropical climate, 1661. 
Regeneration — Outline sketch, 1540. 
Rejoicing amid sorrow — Sun bursting 

through clouds, 266. 
in iniquity — Living in sewer, 791. 
Religion and church— Knowledge and 

schoolhouse, 1489. 
cheerfulness in — Stars, flowers, birds, 

500. 
caution in — Falling up a precipice, 

1470. 
conservatism in — Ice-house, 1500. 
demands courtesy — Paul, 1495. 
enjoyment of real — Fresh bread and 

mouldy loaf, 1496. 
emergency — Life preservers, 1526. 
esthetic — Agriculture by moonlight, 

1449. 
fervor of, to be regulated — Weeds in 

rich soil, 1501. 
first work of, destroying evil — Clearing 

for tillage, 1596. 
formal, and worldliness — Anchor to 

windward, 1474. 
for time of trouble — Ship's aiiclior- 

chain, I447. 
genuine fruits of, acceptable — Pomology 

and apples, 1485. 
getting the start — Art student, 1585. 
half-hearted — Valetudinarian, 1492. 
human nature without — Overgrown 

forest, 144 1, 
merely ceremonial — Cloud without rain, 

1532- 

not a make-shift — Garment, 1445. 

mechanical arrangement — Ticket 
to heaven ; life insurance, 
1462. 
mysterious — Secret society initia- 
tion, 1456. 
reason — Eyes and spectacles, 148S. 
transient enthusiasm — Brandy to 
half-drowned man, 1466. 
occasional — Church bell in steeple, 1525. 
partial — Slack harp-strings, 492. 
perennial — Sacrifices of mothers, min- 
isters, good men, 1453. 
popular conception of — Tied up with 

nots, 1483. 
receiving and giving — Min'or, 1463. 
right life — Praying cream and living 

skim-milk, 1433. 
sacred dignity of — Summer as well as 

winter, 1500. 
soul's health — Bodily soundness, 1465. 



586 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Religion, theories of — Life-lioat for indi- 
viduals ; world-saving, 1443. 

true, of heart not head — Paul and Greek 
culture, 1743. 

without love — Hot-house without 

furnace, 1478. 
sympathy is sin — Scribes and Phari- 
sees, 2095. 

work for lifetime — Not finding a mine, 
1484. 
Religious depth relieves trouble — Tide 
floats shoaled ship, 1529. 

despair — Father Champion's prayer- 
meeting in hell, 1491. 

development misjudged — Heathen for- 
saking idols, 1494. 

emotion pernicious if not practical — 
Bonfire, 1497. 

excitement not indecorous — Geometric 
garden ; forest, 1499. 

geniuses — Moses and David, Paul and 
John, 1939. 

inquirer needs sympathy — Fire needs 
air, 1558. 

inspiration, evanescence of — Twilight 
cathedral organ-music, 1 104. 

intolerance conspicuous — Mud on white 
clothing, 2148. 

life difficult in proportion to fineness — 
Cabinet-work, 1479. 

phraseology — Strong talk only for strong 
feeling, 1498. 

pride — Thick hide of self-conceit, 
762. 

professions uncertain — Apple-blossoms 
and apples, 1720. 

progress conditioned on movement — 
Man in boat, 2234. 

reverie — Footsteps washed out by tide, 

'545- 
transient, feeling — Violin with bow 

hung up, 1487. 
Remnants of human life — Wind-blown 

leaves, 678. 
Repeated acts, power of — Snake in spider's 

web, 1405. 
Repentance for outgrown sins — Old craters 

and new, 1411. 
manliness of — Ambushed man beating 

off enemies, 1565. 
not immediate reformation — Washing 

off filth, 1421. 
towards God — Esquimaux seeking 

tropics, 1566. 
Repented sins to be forgotten — Mummies ; 

gravestones, 1567. 
Reprobation possible — Destroyed sensi- 
bility of nerve, 1423. 
Republics — Throned empires, ruling self, 

975- 



Republics demand jiopular virtue — Steam- 
engine needs steam, 973. 
South American — Earthquakes and vol- 
canoes, 968. 
Repudiation morally more dangerous than 
war — Serpent ; lion, 1006. 
supjiressed — Measles, 1004. 
Reputation and character — Reaping and 
sowing, 897. 

social connections — Vine and trellis, 

903- 
emptiness of — Shadow, 939. 
from everyday life — State chamber and 

living-room, 904. 
without character — Poorly built house, 

893- 
Resist beginnings of evil — Prairie-fire, 58. 
Resolution and performance — Descending 

mountain, 846. 
Rest of God, the — Scared bird returning 

to nest, 2038. 
Restorative power of good — Tree healing 

its wound, 2567. 
Restraint needed by man — Messenger colt, 

423- 
Resurrection, a type of — Dandelion, 331. 
Retribution, physical, inevitable — Scars, 
maiming, etc., 188. 
taught by Christ — Drawing back cur- 
tain, 2250. 
Retrospect at end of year — Taking ac- 
count of stock, 1664. 
Retrospection to be helpful — Honey not 

bitterness from flowers, 1758. 
Revenge a torment — Dante's Hell, 427. 
Revelation, unveiling of things not known 
— Mother teaching child, 1887. 
cannot be undone — Blossom cannot be 

returned to seed, 2244. 
of God requires receptivity — Sun on 

Sahara and prairie, 1707. 
the primitive — Opened by science, 2229. 
the rocks — More important than Egyp- 
tian excavations, 2230. 
Revelations of old, modern commonplace 

— Baby's bottle and man, 1885. 
Reverence for women — Mother ; sisters, 89. 
Revivals of religion, awaken life — Robin 
on eggs, 155 1. 

grades of desirability in — Cloth- 
ing, 2129. 
natural — Business boom, 871. 
sweep away worldly obstructions — 

Freshet in the soul, 2132. 
working for, proper — Crops ; civ- 
ilization ; arithmetic, etc., 2127. 
Rich fool, the — Men's naming, and God's, 
615. 
making haste to be, criminal — Law of 
equivalence, 609. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



587 



Rich, selfish, men — Unfaithful army 
nurses, 605. 

Riches and religion — National develop- 
ment proportioned to national wealth, 

599- 
interior — Pearls and diamonds, 1074. 
inward and outward — Pauper and 

prince, 695. 
Right unconscious rebuke of wrong — Ex- 
amples, 825. 
and wrong variable — Assassin's and 

surgeon's knife, 1039. 
Righteousness, a natural law — Health and 

hospital, 1473. 
importunate longing for — Hunger and 

thirst, 1 103. 
physical and social, not spirituality — 

House without roof, 1027. 
thrives — Trees along Hudson River, 

1514- 

Rights, personal, for giving away — Cour- 
tesy in the home, 924. 

Ritual not vital — Trellis for grape-vine, 

2053- 
observances respected not obligatory — 
Levitical eatings, etc., 2139. 
Roman Catholic Church and the Sects — 
Broom-handle and broom-splints, 
2146. 
Romans, Epistle to the — St. Peter's at 
Rome, 1942. 
VII chapter imprisoning conscience — 

Leaf in eddy, 1941. 
VII and VIII — Mountain stream, 
meadow brook, 1940. 

— Overture to Wagner's Tann- 
haeuser, 1943. 
VIII, close of — Dome of St. Peter's,i942. 
Romantic love, " at sight " — Spark from a 
flint, 114. 

beginning of, beautiful — Flower- 
ing blossom and fragrance, 99. 
growth of — May, June, July, August, 

100. 
higher life in — Bud in sunshine 

starts the root, 103. 
in brief attachments — Hyacinth, 

107. 
must rise above passion — Bird's 
nests built in the grass, cut down, 
105. 
needs nourishment — Unfed, starves, 

114. 

without God — Lamp without oil, 
106. 
Rudeness, good-natured — Newfoundland 

flog. 753- 
Rule — A mould, 952. 
Rules teach principles — Walking-chairs for 

babies, 953. 



Russian despotism to be reconstructed — 

Plowing of an old field, 2517. 
Ruth, the Book of — Vibration of a bell ; 
peace after war, 1900. 
story of — A pearl, 1899. 

Sabbath — Pearl among days, 2040. 

for workingmen — Fish coming up to 
breathe, 2041. 

laws to vaiy with community — City and 
country, 2045. 

luminous leader of civilization — Pillar of 
fire, 2049. 

made for man — Man's beast to be ridden, 
2047. 

means " rest " — Continuity of effort hm- 
ited for success, 2039. 

necessary labors on — Railroads, 
2047. 

needed by poor — Warm house one 
blanket, cold house three, 2042. 

of Puritanism — Author's boyhood ex- 
perience, 2043. 

rest of, worship — Poor man's garret, 
fields, or church, 2044. 

saloons to be closed — On clcction-day ; 
in school vicinity, 2046. 

sweetest day — Breast of the whole 
week, 2048. 

vitality of the — Other Mosaic insti- 
tutions gone, 2049. 
Sacrifice, joy of — Mother with sick child ; 

father in Indian raid, 7. 
Saloon-keepers to be held responsible — 

Ox in Mosaic law, 2365. 
Salutations, ancient and modern — Ex- 
amples, 808. 
Salvation and salvableness — Conversion 
without change, 1454. 

in Christ's name alone — Collins's axes, 
1476. 

never shown as impossible — Slamming 
door in face, 2322. 

simplicity of — Life-boat, 1549. 

to be wrought out — Artist and picture, 

1589. 
Satan, fishing line of — Evil for the sake of 

good, 562. 
medieval conception of — Sooty monster, 

1231. 
Saviour, a personal — World gives poetry 

to the poet, 1264. 
Saxon tongue in self-description — Arrow 

to mark, 789. 
Scandal — Venomed arrow, 796. 
Scenery to be viewed recei)tively — Daguer- 
reotype plate, 2551. 
Sceptic may be dropping old for better 

new — Dead leaves and fresh growth, 

1983. 



5S3 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Scepticism good aiul bad — Plus and 
minus, Iy82. 
dogmatism poor remedy for — i'ut eyes 

out for ophthalmia, 1975. 
of to-day — Commercial, political, re- 
ligious, 564. 
Scholastic prejudice rejecting truth — Rab- 
bis and Jesus, 2433. 
Sctiool, common, associations permanent — 
Tree-branches and root, 2420. 

comradeship teaches sympathy — 
Author and old schoolmate, 2421. 
democracy of — Plow leveling corn- 
ridges, 2422. 
of Christ — School of Raphael, 1722. 
Science and sentiment — Walking and fly- 
ing, 2038. 
discovering truth — Picking lock and un- 
packmg trunk, 2538. 
Scientific trutli in Christian — Whatsoever 
things are true, 2465. 

refused — Man in dungeon, 2231. 
without gospel — Sailing on iceberg, 
2231. 
Seclusion not religion — Sponges and oys- 
ters, 547. 
Secretiveness — Wall for defence ; veil for 

shelter, 1386. 
Sects, divisions of God's army — Cavalry, 
infantry, artillery, 215 1. 
efficiency of — Splints of broom for 

sweeping, 2146. 
for specific variation in generic unity — 

Households, 2161. 
misjudging each other — Statue of man 

and lion, 2149. 
mutual respect of rights — Stealing sheep 

from pastures, 2162. 
variety of — All flowers children of Sun, 
2152. 
Seeking good not evil — Doves, buzzards. 

Self, selling one's — Harp without strings, 

614. 
Self=absorption — Goose on a spit, 398. 
consciousness — Tape-measure; safe- 
lock, 763. 

bad in good deeds — Dyspepsia, 859. 

deception in Christian hope unlikely — 

Loving a woman ; enjoying a peach, 

1601. 

description, Saxon words in — Arrow to 

mark, 789. 
education invariable — Man not bucket 

pumped full, 2421. 
examination advisable — Grain worth 
straw and husk, 147 1. 

true — Copying Raphael's Trans- 
figuration, 1665. 
unpleasant — Pulling do\\ n hat, 400. 



Self-government not from over-government 
— Severe parents, 2427. 
gratulation on old religious experience 

— Mean man's generosity, 2126. 
immured — Italian story, woman built in 

wall, 615. 
judgment through others — Hedgehog, 
905. 

uncertain — Buoy, 906. 
knowledge — Merchant's account-books, 
1436. 
as to tendency — Anchored, sailing, 
or drifting, 1666. 
measurement upwards — The poet, 2440. 
portraiture by motives — Sculptor's 

chisel, 432. 
recognition — Portrait of an angel, 433. 
revelation — Painting one's own portrait, 

401. 
righteousness sign of low attainment — 
Learning to write, 1628. 
Selfisfl aspirations — Rising to ice-clad 
heights, 851. 
man solitary — At death his own mourner, 

2383- 
service — Ants caressing flowers, 574. 
superiority — Spinning silk to embroider 
own life, 1736. 
Selfishness and love in conflict — Whirl- 
wind, 1786. 
Sensibility to the Divine — The aspen-tree, 

19S4. 
Sensitiveness — Thin-skinned and thick- 
skinned, 777. 
to injury — Tinder in certain faculties, 
816. 
Sentiment undervalued by sordid sense — 
Birds and farmer, 406. 
value of — Perfume of Magdalen's vase, 

1068. 
without ethics — Narrow ship, wide- 
spread sails, 1450. 
Serenity, in consciousness of God — Child 

and mother, 1537. 
Service, lowly — Washing of feet, 1768. 
Sermon on the Mount — development of 
future from past — Wheat from old 
straw, 2228. 
best of Old Test, truths— Mount of 
vision towards promised land of Spirit, 

1932- 

loftiness of — Keyed to high pitch, 1928. 

not original — New sprout from old stock, 
1929. 

opening of — Bell chimes, Antwerp 
cathedral, 1930. 
Sermons, brilliant — Rockets, 2292. 

failures in — Shot missing its aim, 2323. 

for certain conditions — Medical pre- 
scription, 2319. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



589 



Sermoas, " great " — Steeples without bells, 
2286. 
materials and tools for man-building — 

Architect selecting woods, 2336. 
poor, must sometimes be — No valleys, 

no mountains, 2276. 
subjects for, found everywhere — Botani- 
cal specimens, 2317. 

how to find — Watchmaker seeking 
right tool, 2318. 
transientness of — Showers of rain, 

2333- 
Shame for sin — Wind-stricken bulrush, 

1435- 
Sharing good things — Magnolia-fragrance, 

417. 
Sick bed — God's flower-bed, 212. 
Silence, heroism of — Indian under torture, 

96. 
Silent corrupting forces — Malaria, 1369. 
Sincerity — Older and later painters, 

Italian and German, 822. 
Sin — Definition of, 1381. 

against the Holy Ghost, general not 

specific — Bodily dissipation, 81. 
destroys great natures — Girdled trees, 

1417. 
disjointed faculties — Dislocated limbs, 

1390. 
evolutionary view of, convincing — 

Preaching Adam's fall, 1383. 
fundamental in theology — Disease and 

medical science, 1382. 
is against God, not law — Cheating cus- 
tomer, not scales, 1429. 
latent — Raked-up fire; powder, 1399. 
meanness of intelligent — Dog's grati- 
tude ; man's ingratitude, 1428. 
new view of — Conflict between animal 

and spiritual, 2239. 
not hereditary — Soot in flues, 139 1. 
offending divine parent — Mother and 
family law, 1430. 
Sickness neglected — Bodily ills attended 
to, 1083. 
wrong use of right faculties — Sccretive- 
ness, 1386. 
Sincerity and wrong belief — Lead for 
tools; triangle for wheel, 1977. 
makes no error right — Fire always fire, 

1609. 
motive power of good or evil — Mallet, 

1977- 

Sinfulness of man and God's forgiving love 
— Memory of mother, 1204. 
tested by trying on Jesus Christ — Gar- 
ments, 1569. 

Singing, congregational, not without home- 
singing — March dripping, August 
shower, 2067. 



Singing, congregational, to be cultivated — . 
Not like birds, 2066. 
church, a — Garden with flowers, 2061. 
the highest ministration of sanctuary 
— Wings, 206S. 
defence against temptation — Golden 

bow and arrow, 2065. 
uplifting ])ower of — Railroad to top of 

Mt. Washington, 2064. 
with untrained voice to be modest — Not 
like Niagara, 2062. 
Single instances — Single wedges, 1725. 
Sinner needs God — Sick man and physi- 
cian, 1431. 
Sins great and little — Conflagration ; 
teredo, 1396. 
insidious — Not lions but serpents; 

moth, 1359. 
secret — Ships anchored, 1397. 
Slander — Cannibalism, 944. 
Slang — Warts on the tongue, 790. 
Sleep, a forgetting — Sponge to wipe out 
fatigue, 204. 
and waking — Death and resurrection, 

202. 
not to be gauged by other's deeds — 

Wesley; Napoleon, 205. 
swallows one-third of life — Sea, 204. 
Small meannesses empty the heart — 
Worms at wine-cask, 716. 
transgressions damage the soul — Steal- 
ing an apple, 735. 
vexations annoy — Dust sifting through 
cracks, 737. 
Smartness, dangers of — Spider's webs and 

cordage, 570. 
Smooth natures admirable, not attractive 

— Canals, 84. 
Social duty of healthful living — Rotten 
thread in fabric, 918. 
effect of feeling — Contagion, 1459. 
gain through suffering — Cost of liberty, 

917. 
influence — Making photographs, 834. 
interdependence — Animal and vegetable 

nature ; the body, 832. 
liability to disaster — Foundation of 

neighbor's house, 919. 
life, diversity of — Trees, not jointed 

logs, 923- 

polish — Boulders worn smooth in river, 
831. 

relationships changed — Hebrew and 
American slavery, 853. 

solidarity — Trees in forest and in clear- 
ing, 875. 

suffering — Family and friends of wrong- 
doer, 913. 

unrest in Europe — Volcanic conditions, 
998. 



590 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Social violation of, law, punished — Thorn- 
hedge, 852. 
Society, bottom of, all-important — Foul 
cellar, 936. 

burdened by dishonesty — Ancient armor, 
914. 

limitations of — Trees in forest, 836. 

more wholesome than solitude — Child, 
rock, toadstool, 833. 

moves by average mass — Not cream ; 
not sails alone, 2493. 

suffering between labor and capital — 
Carcass between vultures, 929. 

to control individual conduct — Pump 
from bad well, 921. 

top and bottom of — Blossom and root of 
magnolia, 934. 

varying standards in — Ship's forecastle 
and college, 937. 
Solitude — Wood-thrush in, 841. 

no safety in — Devil at leisure in wilder- 
ness, 840. 

sweet after society — Rests in music, 841. 
Sonship, conscious — Noble Hungarian 
refugees, 1538. 

evidence of, in personal attraction — 
Child and parents, 1709. 
Sorrow carries germ-forms of joy — Seeds 
planted seek light, 222. 

develops peace — Frost unlocks seed- 
shells, 241. 

earthly, suggests heavenly joy — Dis- 
comforts of sea-voyage, 238. 

exercising men — Wrought-iron at Nu- 
remberg, 264. 

followed by joy — Storm-clouds, sun- 
lighted, 232. 

for Lincoln's death — Huge storm sweep- 
ing continent, 246. 

helps to bear fruit instead of leaves — 
Pruning-knife, 237. 

intermittent — The motion of the sea, 
240. 

persisted in — Raking out coals from 
ashes, 249. 

present, joy to come — Fair pattern 
woven in looms of God, 225. 

retained too long, works injury — Etch- 
ing plate over-exposed to acid, 250. 

sometimes paralyzes soul — Cold late 
rains on vegetation, 248. 

sounds from all humanity — Distant 
moan of surf, 269. 

sweetens the spirit — Frost ripens nuts 
and fruits, 268. 
Soul bondage, release from — Escape from 
war-captivity, 1590. 

building — Solomon's temple, 1659. 

cheerless, culture — Farm and family, 
491. 



Soul, Christ in the, a growth — Begins as 
baby, 1646. 

creation — House built by architect, 1061. 

effects of, on others — Comet, 800. 

enriched by love — Summer abundance, 
1524. 

evil powers of — Torture machines and 
arms in London tower; Springfield 
armory, 734. 

exhaustion — Candle consumed, 1407. 

finding God — Sunrise, 1533. 

health — Bodily hygiene, 17 18. 

in danger — Scornerat conversions, 21 25. 

life, value of — Books, hymns, songs, in- 
ferior, 1077. 

manifested — Furnace ; lamp, 1079. 

ojien to Divine influence — Slate and 
glass roof, 1 30 1. 

qualities disproportionate — Military 
band; chorus, 1684. 

regimen — Regularity in eating, 17 17. 

response of the, to God — Memnon and 
rising sun, 1675. 

resurrection — Grave-clothes to be re- 
moved, 1542. 

self- building of — Kentucky caves, 1635. 

sickness ignored — Bodily ills doctored, 

1439- 
torpidity of, favors disease — Bark-bound 

tree, 1663. 
unexplored, the — Columbus, 1086. 
South American republics — Earthquakes 

and volcanoes, 968. 
Sown in dishonor, raised in glory — 

Autumn seeds, spring flowers, 265. 
Speculators, ruthless, worse than law- 
breakers — Piercing with plans, 573. 
Speaking evil — Wild-fire ; cannibalism, 
787. 
habits of — Sparks of fire or oil, S04. 
truth in love —Quaker and fiery aboli- 
tionist, 925. 
Spirit of man, God's image — Statue and 
packing-case, 362. 

unequally developed — Bodily mon- 
strosities, 363. 
races beyond man — Musical theme 
elaborated, 86. 
Spiritism and spiritual longing — Stalactites 

and stalagmites, 1084. 
Spiritual achievement permanent — Sun- 
drawn clouds, 1698. 
ancestry — Family pride, 1099 
betterment, process of — Medication for 

sickness, 1625. 
conflicts — Kaulbach's painting, 1610. 
contagion — Sympathy of moods, 890. 
culture — The rose, 1667. 

becomes easier — Plowing same 
field, 1673. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



591 



Spiritual death — Drowned man, 1326. 
development takes time — Planting and 

transplanting, 1708. 
discernment not questionable — Tastes ; 

observation, 1063. 
early aids in, outgrown — First leaves of 

bean, 1647. 
grace to be cultivated — Garden crops, 

1695. 
growth gradual — Stages of plant-growth, 

1618. 
slow in proportion to fineness — 
Cutting wax, marble, diamond, 
1615. 
guidance — Instructor in algebra, 1323. 
hindrances — Back-water on wheel, 1693. 
impulse superior to law — Hat off to 

lady, 1686. 
kindred — Heloise, 1731. 
labor immortal — Work on men's souls, 

535- 
life begins obscurely — Vegetable growth, 

'573- 
uncertainly — Wick just kindled, 
1598. 
missed without Holy Spirit — Archer 

and mark, 1309. 
moods — Traveler's interrupted views, 

1056. 
nature of unspiritual men — Pyramids, 

1016. 
not gauged by senses — Higher and 

lower courts, 1064. 
persistence, lack of — Swinging of pendu- 
lum, 1760. 
qualities not abundant — Flowers in a 

button-hole, 1674. 
refreshment — Mountains from clouds, 

1679. 
skill gained by self-denial — Learning 

the violin, 1614. 
subject to natural laws — Peasant woman 

and winnowing machine, 1672. 
union — Jesus after and before ascension, 

1082. 
value of secularities — Chaff to wheat; 

husk to corn, 545. 
Spirituality AND Morality— " And " has 

iron hands, 1041. 
hindered by ecclesiasticism — Fruit under 

leaves, 2154. 
immature yet genuine — Developing oak, 

1619. 
individual growth in — Each tree more 

fruitful, 1534. 
late of development — Kindling a fire, 

1706. 
misunderstood — Vulgarity, delicacy; 

glutton, temperance ; cruelty, tender- 
ness, 1067. 



Spirituality without God — Swimming not 

sailing, 1460. 
Spontaneous virtue — Water in well- 

jilumljed house, i486. 
Standards, men judged by their own — Tl>e 

" good fellow " ; the religious man, 

474- 
of self-judgment — Men four feet high, 

359. 

Steadfastness — Every link of the chain 
firm, 468. 

Stimulants — Destroying house to feed fire, 
195. 

Strength of man in God — Sojourner Truth 
and Frederick Douglas, 2028. 

Strenuous life, trials of — Business ; poli- 
tics, 845. 

Strong natures attractive — Rough land- 
scape, 85. 
phrases for strong feelings —Religion ; 

battle, 1498. 
the, duty of — Higher branches shade 
lower, 598. 

Style, complexity and simplicity of — Dr. 
Johnson, John Bunyan, 2299. 

Success, character the test of— Puff-ball 
and prince, 622. 
dishonest, transient — Dandelion-gold, 

571- 

exacts effort — No " deadheads " in na- 
ture, 510. 

unsuccessful — Sahara of gold sand, 612, 
Suffering cleanses — Baptism, 271. 

endurance of, transmutes lower elements 
into higher — Philosopher's stone, 258. 

from one's own fault needs balm before 
criticism — Good Samaritan, 881. 

God's fashioning of manhood — Sculp- 
ture, 647. 

means elevation — Sheep's wool in King's 
robe, 259. 

not typical of Christianity — Medicine, 
not food, 252. 

ripens the spirit — Early frost autumnal 
leaves, 261, 

seekers of — Weeping willows, 1994. 

the price of good — Household tears and 
vigils, 658. 

the test of love — Christ the exemplar, 

Sulkiness a sin — Family in smoke, 742. 
Sulphurous match — A marriage in discord, 

104. 
Sunday (See Sabbath). 
Superficial betterment — Arboriculture, 

1038. 
Superstition dispelled by righteousness — 

Mists before the sun, 2559. 
Surrender, beautiful — Smiling dead on 

battlefield, 687. 



59^ 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Susceptibility of man — Thermometer, 834. 
Sweet'SOuted men under barbaric views of 

(ukI — Honey from lion, 2217. 
Sweetness under injury — Maple-sugar sap, 

S17. 
Symbol of Deity — The sun, fatlicr of ener- 
gies, 2560. 
Symbolism of Bible not reducible to art- 
form — Shakespeare's supernaluralism, 
1902. 
Symbols and rituals — Ladder, 1257. 

in religion, natural and artificial — Ex- 
amples, 2549. 
Sympathy, comfort of mere — Jesus in 
Gethsemane ; child and mother, 885. 
lack of, infidelity — Severity to God's 

children, 945. 
of heart — Poultice on bruise, 880. 

moods — Management of children, 

soul unappreciated — Critics of spirit- 
ual help, 886. 
practical — Surgeon, 888. 
rich man without general — Tree with 

one root, 604. 
seeks the needy — Whittling pine and 

lignum vita;, 1770. 
variations of — Hard in business, gener- 
ous at home, 2396. 

Talents, man of few — Firefly, star, 358. 
Talk, needless — Wind for cockle-boat and 

for ship, 780. 
Talking, endless — Printed in a volume, 781. 
Tampering with evil — Chopped bait before 

the hook, 1422. 
Teacher and preacher nobler than artist — 

Michael Angelo, 2414. 
work of, most profitable — Investment at 

interest, 2415. 
Teaching, divine — Boy learning to swim. 

Tearless grief — Rain turned to ice, 224. 
Tears — God's seeds, 159. 

and blood — Cement by which God 

builds world, 2371. 
make souls beautiful — Dew on flowers, 

226. 
relief in sorrow — Glaciers softened by 

warmth, 228. 
reveal God — Telescope, 235. 
Teasing — Black thread in white web, 784. 
Temper not destroyed but used — Mountain 

brook, 752. 
Temperament, equivalents of — Iceberg ; 

equator, 378. 
Temple of God defaced — Illness from 
abuse of body, 217. 
or hut for children — Health a parental 
obligation, 137. 



Temptableness variable — Tests of different 

woods, 1370. 
Temptation almost saved from — Undertow 
of sea, 1415. 
dallying with — Thoughtless maiden, 

deceitfulness of — Ambush in war, 1375. 

finds welcome — Seed in prepared 
ground, 793. 

inconspicuous, most dangerous — Treach- 
ery in fort, 1 37 1. 

indirect — Flanking the enemy, 1373. 

living above — Devil's arrows, 1380. 

marks danger-line — Driving near preci- 
pice, 1355. 

of Jesus — Spirit of this world, 1 231. 

like earlier prophetic scenes — 
Drifted boulder, 1924. 

perils of — Lord Clive in India, 1376. 

power of, in soul — Spark on powder, 

1350- 
prompt escape from — Cat and mouse, 

1365- 
resistance to — Dikes of Holland, 1372. 
seeks the indolent — Wind sowing seeds 

on prairie, 1377. 
steadiness under — Anchored vessels, 

1354. 
suggestive not compulsory — Inspiration, 

1353- 
to be avoided — Maelstrom, 1356. 

fled before it comes — Promontories 

and tide, 1364. 
watched against at dangerous hour 
— Indian attacks, 1362. 
works in secret — Yeast; seed, 1378. 
Tempter and tempted — Harper and harp, 

1352- 
as angel of light — Morning star, 123I. 
Tender places in hard natures — Sore 

muscle, 2320. 
Theological controversies — Chicken-pox 
and measles, 2264. 
transformation of Bible — Mother's boy 

changed to martinet, 1956. 
transition dawn of great future — Galileo, 
2233. 
Theologies, intercliangc of — Goods for 

grain, 2220. 
Theologizing and preaching — Making 
tackle and catcliing lish, 2313. 
a question of implements — Men discuss- 
ing tools, 2178. 
on God in Clirist — Changing grapes to 

wine, no longer grapes, 1151. 
only philosopliizing — Mother love and 
theory, 2195. 
Theology, God's love root of the " ad- 
vanced " — Spinal marrow and brain, 
2246. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



593 



Theology not preaching — Forging, n(jt 
using, sword of the Lord, 2354. 
religion — Dissected body not a 
man, 1461. 
systematic — Image in Daniel's vision, 

2196. 
to be restored by Evolution — God's 
temple cleared of sand-drift, 2242. 
Theory and practice — Catalogue and fruit, 

'536. 
Thievery, legislative and private — Albany 

and Sing Sing, looS. 
Thinking and doing — Flying and hopping 
of bird, 452. 

praying — Arithmetical problems, 

393- 
in a murk — Old-fashioned sermon- 
making, 395. 
ineffective — Cherry blossoms without 

cherries, 385. 
under authority — The clam, 2107. 
Thought and feeling — Arrow and bow, 402. 

empire of — Description, 1440. 
Thoughts and things — Indolent youth ig- 
norant of work, 519. 
hidden, the best — Pearls to be dived for, 

384. 
multiplicity of — Drops of a river, 391. 
noble — Greater than star-making, 396. 
transitory — Meteors, 380. 
Time and tasks — Husbandman in spring, 

537- 
best seasoner — Tan-bark, 1639. 
Toil, pleasure in homely — Planting rough 

ground for beauty, 529. 
Toleration compulsory — Fruit guarded by 

wall, 151 1. 
Tomb, the, to reveal the infinite beyond — 

Telescope, 244. 
Tongue and ear leagued for evil — Scav- 
engers and sewer, 793. 
control of — Flashes like powder, 782. 
power of — Contrasted with pen, 943. 
Tragedies in life, unnoted — Sudden desti- 
tution, 706. 
Train up a child — Rub education into 

muscle and bone, 12. 
Training changes use, not nature — Hot, 
irritable temper, 429. 
earthly, often valueless for heaven — 
Emigration without language or busi- 
ness ability, 578. 
God's, and earthly father's alike — 

Child to meet troubles, 673. 
in righteousness — Learning to write, 

1624. 
of character — Horse's fine qualities dis- 
ciplined, 428. 

perceptions — Stock exchange ; 
mother at party, 366. 



Training to calmness — Well-broken horse, 

367- 
value of — Amateur house-painting, 509. 
Transgression as education — Boy learning 

to write, 2232. 
Transition periods barren — Desert between 

Israelites and promised land, 2461. 
Transitoriness of human experiences — 

Meteors, 380. 
Trials prove men — Without strain, all 

timber equal, 671. 
test strength — House on sand good in 

fair weather, 624. 
Tribulations, issue of — Flax and white 

raiment, 650. 
Trifles soil life and hide heaven — Dust, 

1700. 
Trouble, blessing in — Connecticut floods, 

^34- 
borrowing, foolish — Livingstone and 

lion, 6S1. 
braving — New England boy in winter, 

648. 
certainty of — Daisy in furrow, 630. 
discipline of — Grindstone, 636. 
escape from — Birds fly above shot, 684. 
God called in time of — Child and 

parents, 2019. 
God's nearness in — Mother and chil- 
dren, 1552. 
great, has cleansing power — Summer 

storm, 267. 
guidance by — Quagmire warning, 663. 
heroism in — Soldiers' duty, 674. 
may not be selected — P'ine house, loved 

ones gone, 243. 
persistent — Kettle-holes in brooks, 683. 
petty, robberies of — Man's need of other 

life, 350. 
present, understood hereafter — Dying 

child and father, 230. 
purification by — Insects and summer 

shower, 664. 
regulation by — Piano-tuning, 649. 
right effect of — Threshing out wheat, 

628. 
small, destroyed by great thoughts — 

Fire-rescue, 665. 
softening the heart — Preparing plate for 

engraving, 245. 
sometimes benumbs — Persons wrongly 

judged, 253. 
training by — Mining, crushing, smelt- 
ing ore, 668. 
Troubles — Windows towards heaven, 639. 
bearing present — Voyage for sake of 

coming joy, 690. 
transient — Modulating discords, 689. 
Trust in God — Faith of child in parent, 

2024. 



594 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



Trust in (Iml — Luhiicating oil, 2022. 

time of distress — Bishop of Geneva, 
2017. 
simplicity of — CiiiKlreu with Jesus, 

'-35- 
Trusting God — Hoys learning to swim, 

-035. 
Truth, broad views of— Prospect from ele- 
vation, 1067. 
crushed to earth — Seed dies to live, 661. 
immortal — Chemical transmutations, 

1322. 
telling adulterated — Gold of eighteen 

carats, 720. 

to be learned — Archery, 15. 
unity in material, variety in higlier, 

views of — Arithmetic and religion, 

2187. 
varies — Neatness in bedroom and in 

stone-mason's stiop, Sio. 
Truthfulness— Backbone, 467. 

of men generally accepted — Deposits in 

bank, 81 1. 
Truths, new, to be questioned ; admitted, 

to be used — Bow and arrows, 2222. 
simple, may begin great effects — 

Music-box key, 2269. 
varied ripening-time of — Early and late 

fruit-trees, 2208. 

Unattainable, value of the — Jacob's ladder, 
1044. 

Unbelief — Wilderness, 1970. 

emptiness of — Abandoned tenement, 
1980. 

Unconscious beauty of Christ-spirit — Mag- 
nolias in blossom, 1792. 
goodness — Leaking grain-wagon, 1744. 

Uneducated, the — Unopened seat-walking- 
stick, 2426. 

Unforeseen effects — Rain, vegetable 
growths, 1327. 

Unity of spirit not of thought — Refreshing 
streams from joined drops, 2 140. 
to be harmony — Different arms of same 
military force, 2263. 

Unseen indulgences — Hidden mine under 
fort, 1360. 

Unsocial temper — Trip-hammer, 755. 

Unsought good — Training in labor unions, 
928. 

Unwritten realities — Exhalations of un- 
stopped vase, 412. 

Use through waste — Sea of sleep drowns a 
third of life, 204. 

Vacations of the workers — Antieus, 583. 
Value, law of — Cost in brain-work, 542. 
measured by quality of labor involved — 
Shearing and weaving, 2496. 



Vanity — Midges and butterflies, 760. 
Variations from purpose — Ship and steer- 
ing line, 451. 
Variety needed — Food; man not machine, 

2039. 
Ventilation disregarded — Eating refuse, 

198. 
Vicarious penalty — Poor-house, 915. 
Vice easily propagated — Seeds sown by 

wind, 1377. 
Victory from defeats of predecessors — 

Moses; Luther; etc., 534. 
Violation of law not always sin — Child 
slapping nurse, 1385. 

cumulative — Snow-flakes and ava- 
lanche, 1404. 
Virtue, automatic — Type-setter, 1 681. 
easy for one born virtuous — Water runs 

down-hill, 1389. 
not negative — Mullein stalk, 1037. 
pays for vice — Caulking leaky hull, 916. 
Virtues dependent on love — Tropical 
fruits on climate, 176/. 
little — Grass, 798. 
of slow growth — Rye, 48. 
quality in— Pictures ; clolli, 830. 
single, and character — A garden and a 

farm, 1655. 
to be automatic — Dancing-school, 797. 
Vision, clouded — Observatory in misty re- 
gion, 1055. 
hours of — Stellar observation, 1054. 
mortal and immortal — Candle and 

lightning, 344. 
of faith — View from Mt. Washington, 
2014. 
Vital functions agreeable — Specifications, 

185. 
Vocal power to be trained for — Newsboys, 

2295. 
Volition and disposition — Examples from 

ordinary life, 1739. 
Vote — Genie escaped from bottle, 931. 

Waiting on the Lord — God stretching time 
wide, 1821. 

War energy used for peace — Swords into 
pruning-hooks, 25 1 1. 

Warnings against moral corruption — 
Plague hospital ; fire alarm ; preci- 
pice, 53. 

Waste in creative process — Carpenter's 
shavings, 2558. 

Watch temptation at dangerous hour — In- 
dians' attack, 1362. 

Ways of salvation various — Gates to New 
Jerusalem, 2261. 

Weak, power of the — Rain, 520. 

Weakness, power of, with God — Apostles; 
Savonarola ; Huss, 2356. 



WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 



595 



Wealth burying aspiration — Statues in 
overwhelmed cities, 6i6. 

dangers of — Dangers God's whetstones, 
6oi. 

hoarded — Dust of sepulcher; powder, 
594- 

honor or shame depends on use — Pedes- 
tal or pillory, 592. 

lost, appreciated — Bag full of holes, 619. 

making, civic virtue — Arabs, 6cx). 

national, measures civilization — Riches 
and religion, 599. 

no title to remembrance — Cloud; muck- 
rake; coalo,cuttle, 617. 

to be diffused — Manure-heap, 602. 

used for mankind — Peter Cooper, 618. 

with goodness — Saint in a golden niche, 

597- 
wrung from the poor — Molten gold 
down the children's throats, 610. 
Wedded love comprehendeil only through 
life — Rill, stream, river, 109. 
changes emotion to action — Rain, 

vegetation, 127. 
disappointment in — Summer brook, 

119. 
failing under trials — Burnt-out 

candles, 120. 
ideal of — Gold veined in rock, 1 10. 
in service — The brook and the mill- 
race, 128. 
infidelity in — Treachery in the for- 
tress, 122. 
lacking, wealth is poverty — Candle 

and candlestick, 124. 
of mere emotion short-lived — Feel- 
ing, developing conduct, 113. 
should grow with years — Develop- 
ment of seasons, 108. 
Welh wishers — Chaff without seeds, 2072. 
Wicked, future of the, unknown — Caves of 
unsounded depth, 2219. 
prayer of the — The prodigal son, 

1824. 
sacrifice of the, abomination — Gambler 
contributing on Sunday, 2055. 
Wife, influence of — Atmospheric, 117. 

and husband — Church and Christ, 121. 
Will, the human — Rudder, 1458. 
Willingness the ground of adoption — Five 

Points children, 157 1. 
Wisdom, search for divine — Prospecting 

for gold, mo. 
Wishing and willing — Liking and loving, 

1653. 
Wit — Spark to light guiding torch, 482. 

evil — Harlotry of wickedness, 771. 
Without me, nothing — Parental blessing, 

1 168. 
Witness, false — Judgment-seat, jSS. 



Woman at the sepulcher — Root seeking 
moisture, 91. 

beauty of, made for daylight — Flowers, 
birds, etc., 95. 

Godless, in marriage — Lamb to the 
slaughter, 106. 

influence of — Salt air east of Alle- 
ghanies, 90. 

nature of, not changed by development 
— Sex dyed in the wool, 93. 

power of, in trouble — Man's bank- 
ruptcy, 98. 

reverence for — Memories of mother and 
sisters, 89. 

strength of, compared with man's — 
Branches and roots, 92. 
Womanhood, men without faith in — Hiss- 
ing serpents, 88. 
Woman's natural gifts to be consecrated — 
Memory of author's mother, dancing, 

94- 

silence heroic — Indian under torture, 96. 

servitude in love, a glory — Florence 

Nightingale, Miss Barton, Miss Wool- 

sey, 97- 
Word, associations vary — Every man 

different chime of bells, 2054. 
of God effective — Snow with message of 

life, 2561. 
the homely, arouses memories — Echo in 

mountains, 2299. 
Words and thoughts — Bannerets and great 

army, 2442. 
as related to thought — Musical notes to 

melodious ideas, 2299. 
mean what they make men think of — 

Flowers produce sentiment, 2576. 
ugly — Thorn-bush seed, 786. 
Work, blessedness of — Ship under head- 
way, 553. 
good, in unconspicuous places — Phidias, 

524. 
high destiny of humble — Building of 

Solomon's Temple, 521. 
honesty in — Building good houses, 826. 
love of — Lyman Beecher; old war- 
horse, 505. 
makes possible better work — Soil from 

former materials, 531. 
measures man — Mind using body as 

tools, 506. 
obscure- — Bud for future growth, 527. 
on beginnings — Foundation-work; St. 

Paul, 523. 
seemingly unfruitful — Seed-sowing in 

mid-ocean, 526. 
the providence of — " Fowls of the air," 

517- 

— " Lilies of the field," 518. 
World — A grindstone, 626. 



596 



INDEX OF THOUGHTS 



World, n place of [)rL'iKuati(>ii---\Vatcli- 
making, 2476. 

disorder in progress of, yet orderly — 
Whirlwind under law, 2534. 

good for its purposes — Watch, 546, 

growth of the — Expansion of tree, 
2469. 

growth, three stages of — By root, stem, 
and maturation, 2541. 

law in tumult of — Sorting letters in 
post-office, 2535. 

life helps soul-life — Husk of corn, 
1658. 

long growth of the — Oak ; cedars ; Cal- 
ifornia redwoods, 2508. 

neighborhood — America feeding the na- 
tions, 2510. 

restlessness — Boiling like a cauldron, 

2537- 
the, not our home — Schoolhouse, not 

dwelling, 336. 
the place for Christianity — Navigation 

and ship; agriculture and field, 

1721. 
this, and the other — Walking on stilts, 

1555- 
a preparation — Tuning-room of or- 
chestra, 1677. 
Worldly life — South African rivers, begin 
large and end small, 17 13. 
things measured by relation to higher 
nature — Home furnishing and chil- 
dren, 1733. 
Worship, external expedients of — Crutches 
for weak souls, 2050. 
praises of, acceptable to God — Children's 

voices, 2051. 
symbolism of, in repetition — Painted 

windows, 2052. 
unity of, impossible — DiiTering word- 
associations, 2054. 



Worth, in tlic olhcr world — Unniaiketable 
investments, 316. 
of each in liis place — Large and small 
flowers in bouquet, 2499. 

Year, last day of the, to be purified — 

Photographic plate, 1757. 
Yes — Precipice; open city-gate, 1376. 
Yielding to God — Gulls flying with the 

wind, 1618. 
Young Christians not to be discouraged — 
Pessimism in farming, 66. 

to be joyful — Birds of bright plu- 
mage and song, nut crows, 67. 
love and its growth — May, June, July, 

August, 99. 
manhood opening of — Spring; fermen- 
tation, 46. 
men to hold faith in the imperfect 
church — Gold-bearing quartz, 68. 
Youth and immortality — In Greek litera- 
ture, 69. 
ashamed of saintly parents — Children 

of Raphael, 63. 
beginning manhood — Embarkation on 

stormy sea, 45. 
critical season for — Amazon ocean- 
estuary, 43. 
misjudgment of — College-success and 
life-success, 44. 
Youth's appetites and passions to be 
trained, not suppressed — Fractious 
horse, 47. 
excesses — Colts ; treasures ; food, 60. 
exposure to vice — Infectious disease, 52. 
natural bent to be heeded — Poet from 

practical parents, 50. 
passions leave marks — God's hand- 
writing, 57. 
recreations improving — Billiards and 
bowling, 55. 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 

WITH THOUGHTS 



Abandonment of arms in war — Ascetic 

Cliristianity, 2192. 
Abyss and safety — Lost and found, 1490. 
Academy, entering the — Examination for 

ciiurch membership, 2074. 
Access to burning building — Approaches 

to men varied, 2321. 
Account-books of merchant — Self-knowl- 
edge, 1436. 
of stock, taking — Retrospect at end of 
year, 1664. 
Acids secreted — Fear corroding, 1992. 
Acorn — Child worthless except for future, 5. 
and oak — Slow growth of character, 

1638. 
timber in — Man's possibilities, 2430. 
Acquaintances, companions, brethren — 
Brotherhood of man, 877. 
not friends — Benevolence in man's 
soul limited, 2387. 
Adam, preaching fall of — Evolutionary 

view of sin convincing, 1383. 
Advocate, hired, of the soul — Conscience, 

1346. 
After-glow of sunset — Posthumous influ- 
ence, 1750. 
Agricultural manual — New Testament the 

hand-book of religion, 1915. 
Air, bad, and dust decay the house — Indo- 
lence corrupts the mind, 530. 
cleansed by motion — Health, 179. 
Alabaster Iwx broken — Love to be mani- 
fested, 805. 

still fragrant — Gifts of love lasting, 
2407. 
Albany and Sing Sing — Thievery, legisla- 
tive and private, 1008. 
Almanacs — Preaching must suit its time, 

2268. 
Alpine avalanches bring summer harvests 
— Peace begins in confusion, 2382. 
climber — Dangers of refinement, 377. 
Alphabet — Justice itself simple, becomes 
complex ,821. 

—The Bible an, 1845. 
learning — Taking up cross in Christian 
life, 145 1. 
Altar, consuming offences on — Good for 
evil as of coals of tire, 1797. 



Altar fire — Devotion that must be kindled, 

1685. 
Amazon, ocean estuary — Critical season 

for youth, 43. 
Ambassador not type of Christ — Medi- 

atorship, 1268. 
Ambush in war — Deceitfulness of tempta- 
tion, 1375. 
Ambushed man beating off enemies — Man- 
liness of repentance, 1565. 
Anchor short of cable — Morality incom- 
plete character, 1025. 
soul's — Hope of immortality, 346. 
steady — A firm hope, 688. 
to windward — Formal religion and 
worldliness, 1454. 
Anchored vessels — Steadiness under temp- 
tation, 1354. 

sailing or drifting — Self-knowl- 
edge, 1666. 
Angel and lion — Rise of humanity, 2524. 

of light — Tempter of Jesus, 1231. 
Anger — Energizing power of excitement, 

439- 
judging peace — Flesh cannot discern 

spirit, 1062. 
to put down, pry up good-nature — To 
cure malign feeling, 949. 
Ant and mountain — Human judgments of 

God, 1 1 20. 
Amateur liouse-painting — Value of train- 
ing, 509. 
Amulets of Indian — Bible texts unintelli- 

gently read, 1848. 
Angler loves catcliing fish — Minister loves 

to fish for men, 2281. 
Animal and vegetable nature — Social inter- 
dependence, 832. 
development perfect — Unlike man, 70. 
man and spiritual man — Darwinian 
view of sin, 2239. 
Animals hiding from pursuit — Children 
driven to deception by fear, 14. 
little — Child's immoral tendencies, 9. 
measured by special superiorities : swine, 

oxen, dogs — Man, by goodness, 71. 
not so cruel as — Man, 82. 
or angels — Exposing error in temper or 
in love, 2377. 



597 



«8 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



AntSUS — Vacalioiis of the workers, 583. 
Ant and cnj^le — Labors of genius, 508. 
Anti-slavery agitators — Obscure reformers 

now illustrious, 2366. 
Ants caressing flowers — Sellish service, 

574- 
Aphides killing plants — Bad temper at 
home, 169. 
outgrown by strong plants — Hap- 
piness from health, 493. 
Apostle lecturing on medicine, without 
cures — Preacher neglecting public 
sins, 2345. 
Apostles, the — Fervency effective, 435. 

— Power of weakness allied with 
God, 2356. 
Apple and pomology — Fruits of real re- 
ligion acceptable, 1455. 
blossoms and apples — religious pro- 
fessions uncertain, 1720. 

and fruit — Position does not make 
the man, 49. 
falling of ripe — Ease of dying, 299. 
quince, blackberry, rose, one genus — 
Human unity generic, variety specific, 
248S. 
stand and hotel — Church discipline with 
differences, 211 1. 
Apple=tree — God's willingness to give, 
1174. 
in winter and spring — Hebraism and 

Christ, 1243. 
late-bearing — Character matures slowly, 

1705- 
Apprentice to learn trade — Getting of 

knowledge brings wisdom, 2431. 
Aqueduct and water — Church and religion, 

2167. 
Arabian Nights not in New York — In- 
dustry, law of success, 515. 
Arabs — Wealth -making, civic virtue, 600. 
Arboriculture — Superficial betterment, 

1038. 
Archer and mark — Spiritual life missed, 

1309. 
Archery — Trutli-telling to be learned, 15. 
Architect, builder of house — Soul-creation, 

1081. 
master-builder ; materials — Enlarging 

ideal of (iod, 1727. 
selecting materials — Preacher seeking 

truths, 2336. 
Arctic fowls — Early hardship, good for- 
tune, 655. 
Aristotle- Plato- Bacon— Heart eloquence 

greater than philosophy, 2270. 
Arithmetic and religion — Unity in lower, 

variety in higher, views of truths, 

2187. 
gained by work — Revivals, 2127. 



Arithmetical problems — Thinking and 

praying, 393. 
Arminius— (ienius in theology, 1979. 
Armor, ancient — Society burdened by dis- 
honesty, 914. 
for fighting — Hope and faith for use, 

1528. 
of God, the whole — Many-sided tempta- 
tions, 1691. 
Army nurses, unfaithful — Rich selfish men, 

605. 
Arnold of Rugby and Thomas Hughes — 

Gratitude to Jesus, 1291. 
Arrow and bow — Thought and feeling, 
402. 
at special target — Love not to be oc- 
casional, 1775. 
silver, from eternal bow — The atone- 
ment in God's love, 1157. 
to the mark — Saxon words in self-de- 
scription, 789. 
Arrows of devil — Living above temptation, 

1380. 
Arsenal — Reading Bible for conflict, 1958. 

venomed — Scandal, 796. 
Art — Life an, requning long training, 927. 
and artists — Ideal beyond the real, 

1043. 
conceptions, early and late — Christ 

bearing the cross, 1248. 
student — " Getting religion," the start, 

1585- 
Arteries for blood — Newspapers carry 

morality, 2454. 
Artist and picture — Salvation wrought out, 

1589. 
becoming an — Character to be perfected, 

1593- 
loves form and color — Minister loves 

men, 2281. 
work not comparable to — Motherhood, 

129. 
young — Unconscious preparation for 
Christianity, 1575. 
Artillery for bombardment — Blessings for 
curses, 1687. 
of pulpit — Every-day lay preaching, 864. 
Aspen tree — Description, 21^82. 

— Sensibility to the Divine, 1984. 
Aster — Maturity in age, 277. 
Astor's pocket picked — Earthly losses in- 
significant, 708. 
Astronomer — Condition of faculties for 
work, 388. 
personal equation of — Moral judgments, 
454- 
Astronomical observation not debatable — 
Spiritual discernment, 1063. 
observatory in city— Business unfavor- 
able to meditation, 556. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



599 



Astronomy and all celestial bodies — True 

church welcomes all, 2080. 
Athlete stripped for contest — Manliness in 

bankruptcy, 561. 
Atmosphere an — Dishonesty permeating, 
746. 
native, and new inspiration — Love in 

Christ and in Paul, 1774. 
power, and subject — Sinfulness, love, 

immortality, as fundamentals, 2265. 
requisite — Holy Spirit cause of higher 

life, 1318. 
without penetrates within — Wife's in- 
fluence, 117. 
Augustine — Genius in theology, 1979. 
Aurora in brick and mortar — Prophetic 

visions translated to fact, 1950. 
Authors read for stimulus — Holy Spirit, 

Autumnal foliage — Preparation for death 
in joy, 307. 
glory — Approach of death, 286. 
Avoirdupois, moral and industrial — Pri- 
mary cause of poverty, 704. 

Babbage's calculating machine — Ideal 

manhood complicated, 80. 
Babe, Jesus to be treated as — Child-Christ 
in child-heart, 38. 
in cradle — Church-religion to care for 

the weak, 2092. 
new-born, needs tender care — Childhood 

conversions, 37. 
rescued in contlagration — God's tender- 
ness for the weak, 1186. 
Babel, tower of — America's polyglot popu- 
lation, 10 14. 
Baby-beginning — Christ in the soul a 

growth, 1646. 
Baby's bottle and man — Ancient revela- 
tions modern commonplaces, 18S5. 
walking-chair — Rules teach principles, 

953- 

Backbone — Truthfulness, 467. 

Backing into heaven — Good men opposing 
hopeful views of God, 2218. 

Back-water on wheel — Hindrances to 
spiritual life, 1693. 

Bacon, Lord — Genius needs industry, 507. 
— Great minds stimulative, 2438. 

Bag full of holes — Lost wealth appre- 
ciated, 619. 

Bailed culprits kept faith — Gratitude an 
inspiration, 819. 

Bait, adapted to fish — Preaching to audi- 
ence, 231 1, 
chopped, before the hook — Tampering 
with evil, 1422. 

Baker — Worry about bread, 625. 

Bamboo — Iiuiian independent, 2518. 



Band, playing cymbals only — Love omit- 
ted, 1795. 
Bank clerk — Other men's crookedness in 
business, 567. 
deposits in — Truthfulness of men gener- 
ally accepted, 81 1. 
note for hundred pounds — God's prom- 
ises neglected, 1209. 
teller — Minister as paid official, 2309. 
Bankruptcy impending — Trouble the time 
for patience, 558. 
of husband — Woman's power in trouble, 
98. 

soul — Material and spiritual losses, 

703- 

Bannerets and great army — Words and 
thoughts, 2442. 

Banyan tree — Nation and the Slates, 980. 

Baptism — Suffering cleanses, 271. 

Barbarian's passions — Conceptions of Ciod, 
II 13. 

Barefoot boy and stone — Iconoclasm of 
Paris communists, 997. 

Barley, smiting ripe — Persecuiion spread- 
ing truth, 644. 

Barometer — Approach of Civil War, 9S0. 
— Moral judgment important, 1412. 

Baronial estate, heir of — Unknown beau- 
ties of Bible, 1866. 

Barton, Clara — Woman's servitude in 
love, a glory, 97. 

Bass-viol and flute — Education varies for 
different children, 2418. 

Bastard Jewish belief — Fall of Adam, 2210. 

Bath, a celestial — Family prayer, 174. 
regulation — Pleasure to make man bet- 
ter, not worse, 200. 

Battle — Great feelings for great occasions, 
419. 
fight not flight in — Trouble to be met, 
not shunned, 637. 

Battle-ax at castle-gate — -Cry of penitent at 
God's bosom, 1826. 
fields on peaceful meadows — Contro- 
versies about Christ, 1938. 

Bay filled with the tide — The peace of 
God, 1765. 

Bayonets — Fear but a restraining agency, 
1991. 

Bean, first leaves of — Early needs out- 
grown, 1647. 

Beast to be ridden — Sabbath made for 
man, 2047. 

Beau and farmer, plow and society — Beauty 
of habit, 835. 

Beautiful edifice — Good man's life, 83. 

Beauty known by taste — Feeling before 
reason, 407. 

Beaver and fly — Happiness in achieve- 
ment, 552. 



6oo 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Bee ami lly — Ouality in activity, 54S. 

after honey — IJibleto be searched, 1S55. 

hive, glass — Transparent character, 590. 

sting of, and needle — Divine and human 

workmanship, 1 188. 

Beecher, H. W., all-embracing theme for 

preaching — Inexhaustible fairy purse, 

235 «• 

amateur house-painting — Value of train- 
ing, 509. 

and Aunt Chandler — Obedience to love 
and to law, 2253. 

old schoolmate — Common school 
comradesliip, 242 1. 

Aunt Bull's dog — Reforms unwisely 
driven, 2378. 

boy-days of whipping — God's discipline, 
1 192. 

boyhood experience of Sunday — Puritan 
Sabbath, 2043. 

child-instinct of heaven^Praise, utter- 
ance of inward joy, 2058. 

determined to preach, not theologize — 
Use, not forge, sword of the Lord, 

2354- 
experience at Lane Seminary — Christ 
and God's goodness, 1220. 

of exalted conditions — Other-world 
tliinking, 2327. 
witli Pres. Lincoln — Value of a good 
name, 902. 
first married home — Home happy, 
humbly begun, 157. 

oratorical inspiration — Real peni- 
tence rare possession, 1640. 
fords in the West — Folly of fear, 1995. 
high garden-wall — Doctrine of total 

depravity hiding God, 2249. 
in an English church — Pulpit or plat- 
form, 2296. 
instructed in algebra — Spiritual guid- 
ance, 1323. 
learning from bobolink — Lesson from 
the birds, 2580. 

philosopher — Knowledge incom- 
plete, 371. 
memory of second mother's dancing — 

Consecration of gifts, 94. 
Ohio River overflow — Modern religious 

influence, 2177. 
painting of flower by his mother — Na- 
ture revealing God, 2565. 
jirofane man rebuked — Confessed Chris- 
tianity a safe-guard, 2089. 
preaching retribution under love — 

Taught by Christ, 2250. 
relic of mother — Early environment, 

844. 
studying mathematics — Nothing for 
nothing, 516. 



Beecher, H. W., teaching boys to swim — 
Trusting Ciod, 2035. 
theological controversies, brought up on 

— Chicken-pox and measles, 2264. 
thunderstorm on Mt. Pleasant — Mystery 

of life cleared, 2037. 
tree like man witli gun — Heavenly view 

of earthly trouble, 1996. 
with Hicks, portrait painter — Human 
soul yet imperfect, 2412. 
Beecher, Lyman — Experience of faith in 
practice, 2025. 

— Obscuration of faculties in age, 

280. 
— Work, love of; old war-horse, 505. 
Beethoven ai/a^'-io from symphony — Mak- 
ing others happy, 803. 
discords resolved — Rough gorge to 

lovely valley, 689. 
Fifth symphony of — 1 Corinthians XIII, 

1944. 
symphony badly played — Imperfection 
of life, 457. 

but noise — Nature interpreted only 
materially, 2574. 
Beggar, starving — Prayer in emergency, 

iSi8. 
Beggars giving to, optional — Other men's 

jirosperity, 705. 
Bcil — -Responsiveness of friendshij), 911. 
in steeple — Occasional religion, 1525. 
muffled by hand — Children and paren- 
tal anxiety, 39. 
of warning — Fear, 1987. 
rings when struck — Nobility compels 

admiration, 867. 
vibrations — Fading impressions of good, 

1 105. 
warbling vibration of — Book of Ruth, 
1900. 
Bells answering wedding-bells — Heart to 
heart on Communion day, 2057. 
in Antwerp Cathedral-spire — Everyday 

gratitude, 1097. 
towers without — Mere money-getters, 

.577- 
vibrations of — Expression of pleasure, 
802. 
Bereaved mother caring for orphans — Af- 
fliction comforted, 239. 
Bible texts unwelcome — Christianity in 

business, 566. 
Billiards and bowling — Youth's recrea- 
tions improving, 55. 
Bird broken-winged — Prayerful thoughts 
but weak, 2cx>6. 
cleaving the air — The heavenly vision, 

1764. 
flight of, affects universe — Effect of life 
on soul, 357. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



601 



Bird flown in at window — Birth of 
baby, I. 
frightened, returning to nest — The rest 

of God, 2038. 
nest in grass, cut down — Love higher 
than passion, 105. 

finished witii the breast — Home 
built by heart, 126. 
scared by scrutiny — Intellection inimi- 
cal to feeling, 1090. 
seeking rest at evening — Act of dying, 

297. 
singing on bough — Independence of 
circumstance, 374. 
Birds fly above fowler's shot — Escaping 
trouble, 684. 
flying and hopping — Thinking and 
doing, 452. 

above dust — Living above care, 
740. 
forcing young to fly — Children and 

present duties, 31. 
nests in winter — Bible of letter, not 

spirit, 564. 
not the model — Congregational singing 

to be cultivated, 2066. 
plucking breast-feathers — God's love for 

his children, 1140. 
seeking entrance — Joys awaiting us, 501. 
singing from trees or in air — Poets and 

prophets, 1053. 
under impulse of transmigration — A 

hope for death-hour, 305. 
undervalued by farmer — Sentiment and 
sordidness, 406. 
Bishop of Geneva — Trust in time of dis- 
tress, 2017. 
Bishops and responsibilities — Church 

councils and authorities, 2157. 
Bismarclc — Excessive activity, 582. 

a despotic ruler — Germanic spirit of 
freedom, 2516. 
Bitter draughts not to be called sweet — 

Christianity not stoicism, 236. 
Blacliberry bushes, grubbing up — Eradi- 
cating bad habits, 724. 
Blacl(Smlth and baby — Gentleness, power 

with sweetness, 812. 
Bladder, bursting — Immoral prosperity, 

543- 
Blade and handle — Lies backed by truth, 

718. 
Blind man in Louvre — Heaven in the 
heart, 332. 
restored, realizes existent beauty — Di- 
vine love eternal, 1183. 
touched twice by Christ — Evils of free- 
dom cured by more freedom, 2347. 
Blood of the universe — God the universal 
medicament, 1 1 80. 



Blood poured like water; fear to avow un- 
popular belief — Varieties of courage, 
472. 
Blossoms cannot be put back to seed — 
Revelations cannot be undone, 2244. 

care not for fruit — Contentment with 
mortality unnatural, 337. 

delicate — Emotions soiled by worldli- 
ness, 1070. 

fallen not mourned — Crape for death, 

257- 
falling before fruit — John the Baptist 

for Jesus, 1922. 
from Old Testament — New Testament, 

1228. 
not fruit — Desiring not choosing, 57. 
Blue and butternut; cutting the beard — 

Mosaic legal details, 1894. 
spot in stormy sky — Hope cures weari- 
ness, 1999. 
Boat must be loosed to go — Religious 

progress means movement, 2234. 
Bodily distemperature under pain — Mind 

should dominate, 364. 
exercise — Ilorse under rider, 206. 
health without spiritual is poverty — 

Flower-pot and soil without seeds, 211, 
hygiene — Soul-health, 17 18. 
ills attended to — Sin-sickness neglected, 

1083. 
members — Church members all needed, 

2085. 
monstrosities — Man's spirit unequally 

developed, 363. 
muscles — Faculties brightened by use, 

389- 
soundness — Religion, soul's health, 

1465. 

Body, a living sacrifice — Patriotic, noble ; 
sensual, despicable, 192. 
and soul — Church and religion, 2166. 
members of, described — A marvelous 

organization, 181. 
rebuilt by various foods — Social interde- 
pendence, 832. 

Boils on body politic — Public spoilsmen, 
1009. 

Bolter of grain — Popular discernment of 
truth, 2225. 

Bolting-cloth catches bran — Hearing of 
evil, 795. 

Bomb percussion — Story explodes when it 
strikes, 483. 

Bones not a man — Law not religion, 2256. 

Bonfire — Religious emotion pernicious if 
not practical, 1497. 

Book^Invention for living after earthly 
death, 1077. 
man not a parent an unread — Revela- 
tions of parentage, 1078. 



6o2 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Books, hymns, songs, inferior — Value of 

soullife, 1077. 
Botanical specimens found everywhere — 

Subjects for sermons, 2317. 
Bottle, empty — Merely moral man, 1030. 
Bow, a straight shooting — Truth in anger, 

and arrow — Preaching is emotion and 
intellect, 2266. 

arrows — Truths, their sources and 

value, 2222. 
to smite Satan — Singing defence 
against temptation, 2065. 
Boys, teaching, to swim — Trusting God, 

2035- 

Brain of war, shafts of song — David, war- 
rior and poet, 1910. 
work, cost in — Law of value, 542. 

Brake on wheel of progress — Conserva- 
tism, 440. 

Bratnb!e=bush — Disputatious man, 745. 

Branch of vine — Man needs God, 1017. 

Branches and root — Common school asso- 
ciations permanent, 2420. 
higher, shade lower — Duly of the strong, 

598. 
not trunk fruitful — Power in diversity, 
2260. 

Brandy to half-drowned man — Religion 
not transient enthusiasm, 1466. 

Brazier's hammer on kettle — Adversity, 

633- 
Bread and medicine — Joy and sorrow, 

1729. 
cake — Common sense better than 
uncommon, 360. 
fresli ; mouldy loaf — Enjoyment of real 

religion, 1493. 
making for hungry child — Man per- 
fecting slowly, 2460. 
of learning — High results of commercial 

enterprise, 588. 
Breast of whole week — The Sabbath, 

2048. 
Breeching and traces — Conservatives and 

progressives, 542. 
Bricks, scattering, not house-building — 

Desultory action, 732. 
Bridge*building by successive cords — River 

of death liy bereavements, 306. 
Bright, John — Excessive activity, 582. 
Brook — Temper not destroyed but used, 

752- 
Broom-handle and broom-splints — Rom. 

Catholic church and sects, 2146. 
Browning, Mrs. — Divine slavery of mother- 
hood, 133. 
Brown, John — Unselfish heroism, 1778. 
Bubble and crystal — Life and immor- 

t-il'ty. 343- 



Bucket, full, spills — Active life liable to 
error, 404. 
man not a, pumped full — Self-education 
invariable, 2423. 

Bud, blossom, fade — Growth of mind 
transitory, 3S0. 
in sunshine starts root — Higher life in 

young love, 103. 
of future growth — Obscure work, 527. 

Budding and grafting in spring — Child- 
hood disciples, 29. 

Buds ready to blossom — Almost a Chris- 
tian, 1557. 

Bug on a leaf — Without hope, most miser- 
able, 2004. 

Building above flood-line — Beginning life 
aright, 64. 
good houses — Honesty in work, 826. 

Bulb's talk about flowers — Doubters of the 
invisible, 1696. 

Bull — Orator's voice, 2298. 

Bullrush, wind-stricken — Shame for sin, 

H35- 

Bundle on head of washerwoman — Noble 
burden-bearing, 1732. 

Bunyan, John, and Dr. Johnson — Sim- 
plicity and complexity of style, 
2299. 

Burdens, bearing one another's — Mutual 
helpfulness, 884. 

Burglar and householder — Selfishness of 
culture, 376. 

Burned district of Charleston — Bad man's 
life, 83. 

Burning stick, fagot, bonfire, furnace — 
Community of feeling, 872. 

Burr and Washington — Superiority of 
moral element, 463. 

Business boom — Revivals of religion 
natural, 87 1, 
department-record — Taking account of 

one's self, 465. 
failing in — Property, not manhood, 641. 
temptations of active — Trials of stren- 
uous life, 845. 
vacillation — Conviction without choice, 
1544. 

Butterfly-chasing — Happiness not to be 
hunted, 489. 

Byron — Obligations of genius to lofty liv- 
ing. 373- 

Cabinet-work — Religious life difficult in 
jjroportion to fineness, 1479. 

Cable tested by stress — Strength of evil in 
men, 1426. 

Cactus — Uncompleted Providences, 1165. 

Cssar — Laliors of genius, 508. 

Caissons of Brooklyn Bridge — Early perils 
of United States Constitution, 964. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



603 



Cake ; bread — Common-sense better tlian 

uncommon, 360. 
Californian emigrants — Inequalities of 
condition disregarded, 699. 
redwoods — Long grovvtii of the world, 
2507. 
Calvin — Genius in theology, 1979. 
Canals — Smooth natures admirable, not 
attractive, 84. 
and rivers — Low and high civilization, 
9S7. 
Candle and candlestick — Wedded love and 
wealth, 124. 

— Hope and patience, 1997. 
lightning — Mortal and immortal 
vision, 344. 
consumed — Soul-exhaustion, 1407. 
flame and sun — Man in God's likeness, 

1 1 14. 
in candlestick — Preacher in old-style 
pulpit, 2296. 

window — Christ in soul-house, 
1285. 

— Home blessings radiated, 163. 
light — Unconscious influence, 854. 
lighted in day-time — Modern miracles, 
1905. 
outdoors — Goodness amid evil, 814. 
to lost traveler — Bible guidance far- 
reaching, 1873. 
unlighted — Undeveloped genius, 372. 
— New Testament without Gospel 
of John, 1937. 
Candles burnt out — Wedded love failing 
under trials, 120. 
unlighted — The Bible as furniture, 1859. 
Cannibalism — Speaking evil, 787. 
— Slander, 944. 

— Unchristian fellowship to errant 
church members, 21 12. 
Captain in battle — Holy Spirit and man's 

cooperation, 1504. 
Caravan of pilgrims — The Divine com- 
forter, 1 194. 
Caravansary — Mixed elements in churches, 

2100. 
Cargoes reappraised — Earth-judgments in 

heaven, 317. 
Carpenter's shavings — Waste in creative 
process, 2558. 
straight-edge — Conduct tested by God's 
word, 1632. 
Carpets in loom and in market — Future 

revelations of character, 349. 
Cascade and mill-stream — Emotion and 

motion, 410. 
Castle chambers abandoned — Unused parts 
of Bible, 1875. 
joy within, storm without — Long-suffer- 
ing, 694. 



Cat and mouse — Prompt escape from 
temptation, 1365. 
up a tree; reversed for men — Pronencss 

to evil, 1394. 
watching for mice — Personal criticism, 

775: 

birds— Commune of 1S71 in Paris, 

935- 

Cathedral and Peekskill hill — God in 
nature, 2569. 
tower and spire — Love supreme, 1766. 
window — I Corinthians XIII, 1945. 

Cauldron, boiling like a — World restless- 
ness, 2537. 

Caulking leaky hull — Virtue pays for vice, 
916. 

Catalogue and fruit — Theory and practice, 
1536. 

Caterpillars — Human view of man, 2527. 

Cavalry, infantry, artillery — Sects divisions 
of God's army, 215 1. 

Cavour and new diplomacy — Love be- 
lie veth all things, 177 1. 

Cedars of Lebanon— Long growth of the 
world, 2508. 

Cellar foul — Bottom of society all impor- 
tant, 936. 

Cement by which God builds the world — 
Tears and blood, 2371. 

Centrifugal not centripetal activity — God's 
unselfish life, 1 149. 

Chaff and shucks not wanted — The best 
for God, 1535. 
straw and grain — Imperfections of great 

men, 375. 
to wheat — Spiritual value of secularities, 

545- 
without seeds — Well-wishers, 2072. 

Chart and navigation — Bible to be ap- 
plied, 1852. 
of New York harbor — Bible study fol- 
lowed by practice, 1865. 

the ocean — Printed Bible a memo- 
rial of life, 1836. 
Chariot — The church man's servant, 

2102. 
Chemical transmutations — Truth immortal- 
1322. 
formula tested — Doctrine proved by 
trial, 2221. 
Check, a sealed, for payment — Eternity 

shows earthly work, 333. 
Checks signed in blank for passions — 

Conscience, 1346. 
Cherry-blossoms without cherries — Inef- 
fective thinking, 385. 
Chess-playing — Crafty devices in business, 

565- 
Chestnut burr and nut — Outside rough, in- 
side sweet, 448. 



6o4 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Chestnut — Siii>cificial judgments of Provi- 

dciuo, 1 162. 
Chestnuts on ground and tree — Cliiistian 

fruits nianward and Godward, 1742. 
Chicago Inc — A lesson in licroism, 2540. 
quick aid for — Brotherhood growing, 

2530. 
Chicken dressed foi- eating, and free fowl 

— Boys in pious biographies and real 

boys, 18. 
pox and measles — Theological contro- 
versies, 2264. 
without eggsliell — Old letter, new 

spirit, 1SS4. 
Chickens and swine in low-built houses — 

Pertinacity of bad habits, 725. 
Child and parents — Understanding of God 

grows with experience, 1137. 

knife — Promises to be earned, 2030. 
appealing to parents — God called in time 

of trouble, 2019. 
apple, and imagination — Idealization, 

1045. 
biography — Truthfulness of Old Testa- 
ment, 1S80. 
dying, and father impotent to explain — 

To know hereafter, 230. 
feeds on mother, physically — So too, 

mentally, 11. 
frightened, reassured by father's " Hem " 

— Personality in associations, 23. 
or pianist — Generosity or benevolence, 

2388. 
reassured by mother — Man's serenity ia 

God, 1537. 
rescued from fire — Gratitude as motive 

power, 1095. 
slapping nurse — Violation of law not 

always sin, 1385. 
tired, falling asleep — Peace of dying, 

301. 
to meet troubles— God's training and 

earthly father's, alike, 673. 
training — Principles follow rules, 1630. 
wearied, asleep in mother's arms — 

Repose of death, 302. 
Childhood permissions — Human life in 

Bible record, 2470. 
Children departed — Lost cares precious, 

260. 
God's, not to be ill-treated — Lack of 

sympathy, infidelity, 945. 
in bad neighborhood — Separateness of 

Jews, 976. 

nursery — Lack of faith foolish, 
2032. 
joyous, not parasites — Praise human not 

Divine need, 2059. 
love of — Intellect colored by emotion 

perceives higher truths, 361. 



Children of others and our own— Judg- 
ments of law and of love, 23. 
pleading for each other — Prayer to God 

for others, 1S31. 
promises to — God's promises fail, lack- 
ing conditions, 1703. 
treating older friend as father — Filial 

liberties awaken love, 22. 
with Jesus — Simplicity of trust, 1235. 
Children's fairy tales — Parable and fable 
as teachers, 28. 
fruitful lives please the father — Gifts to 

God, 1217. 
voices — Praises acceptable to God, 2051, 
Child's attraction to parents — Evidence of 
Divine sonship, 1709. 
love for parents — Unselfish love for 

Christ, 1784. 
poor gift, appreciation of — Gratitude to 

Christ, 1269. 
understanding of parent — Problems of 
Providence, 11 60. 
Chime of bells in every man's steeple — 

Word-associations vary, 2054. 
Chimney, smutty, bird in — Sui)erior to en- 
vironment, 837. 
Chips of substantial thought — Soul's imag- 
inings of Christ, 1266. 
Choctaw not English— Epistle to Hebrew, 

not Paul's language, 1947. 
Chords, playing on tuned — Devil tempts 
the temptable, 793. 
responsive to joy — Happiness not having 
but being, 496. 
Chorus — Soul qualities disproportionate, 

1684. 
Christ — Quiet power of meekness, 1753. 
and Syro-Phenician woman — Delayed 

answer to prayer, 1S20. 
in the manger — Humble beginnings of 

greatness, 643. 
the exemplar — Suffering the test of love, 

233- 
Christian affections, highest — Conceptions 

of God, 1 1 13. 
living — Best Biblical commentary, 17 15. 
treatment, our — Chinese in America, 

lOOI. 

Christ's body and blood for hungry and 
thirsty — Sinners, not the perfect, in- 
vited to communion, 2056. 

Chronometer — God's heart man's standard, 
1170. 

Cider — New thoughts not to be preached 
hastily, 2343. 

Cinder and lamp — We find what we bring, 
861. 

Citizenship, poor and good — Poor church 
members no excuse for neglecting 
Christian life, 1452. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



605 



city and country — Sabbath laws to vary 

with community, 2045. 
CIvk freedom — Liberty in religious think- 
ing, 2225. 
Civil War, the, rejoicing at close — Future 

joy a present help, 334. 
Civilization result of proper causes — Re- 
vivals, 2127. 
Clam, the — Thinking under authority, 

2107. 
Clay and potter — Negro must grow, can- 
not be made, full citizen, 2519, 
hardened by fire — Hearts, by affliction, 
227. 
Clearing for tillage — First work of re- 
ligion in soul, 1596. 
forty acres — Conversion and sanctifica- 
tion, 1594. 
Cliff, climbing a — Difficulty of reforma- 
tion, 1366. 
Climate, a new — Christianity, 1307. 

tropical — Regenerated man will live by 
Spirit, 1661. 
Climbing Natural Bridge, Va. — Aspiration 

exacting, 1662. 
Cllve, Lord, in India — Perils of tempta- 
tion, 1367. 
Clock not measure of prayer — Instant in 
prayer, 18 14. 
run down — The natural death, 296. 
running down — Low standards in public 

affairs, 993. 
to be wound up — Recreation necessary, 
206. 
Cloth — Quality in virtues, 830. 
Clothing — Civil government a natural de- 
velopment, 956. 
Cloves in a ham — Lies told to children, 20. 
stuck in boiled ham — Illustrations for 
mere ornament, 2301. 
Cloud forgotten by thirsty — Wealth no 
title to remembrance, 617. 
hiding glory of God — Influences of Cal- 
vinism, 2205. 
over sun — Influence of cool disposition, 

860. 
quietness of — New Testament miracles, 

1917. 
without rain — Merely ceremonial re- 
ligion, 1532- 
Clouds and rain — Expression gives de- 
velopment, 1688. 

sunshine — Variable natures, 1049. 
of glory from evaporated water — 
Heavenly conception from earthly ex- 
periences, 1 155. 
rain, harvests, fruit — Progress by gener- 
ations, 2462. 
sun-drawn — Spiritual achievement per- 
manent, 1698. 



Clouds with no rain — Mystical interpre- 
tations of the Bible, 1842. 

Clusters giving wine — Syro-Phenician 
woman's case, 1822. 

Coal, live, raked out from ashes — Sorrow 
persisted in, 249. 
scuttle not coal — Wealth no title to re- 
membrance, 617. 

Coat oft" at a fire — Reforms disregard con- 
ventionalities, 2370. 

Cob and corn reversed — Flesh and spirit, 
1065. 

Cochineal insect-dye — Small excellences, 

799- 
Cockade of soldier — Baptism outward sign, 

2138. 
Cock-crow — Preaching on secular aff"airs, 

1003. 
Cock°roach in the food — Mosaic training, 

1895. 
Cocoanut shell and rind^ — Revelation of 

character, 697, 
College-success and life-success — Misjudg- 

ment of youth, 44. 
Collins' axes — Salvation in Christ's name 

only, 1476. 
Color dyed in the wool — Child habits, 12. 
—Sex, 93. 
excitement in Louvre — Transientness of 

high feelings, 413. 
foundation, in painting — Moral senti- 
ment on lower elements, 475. 
palette full of rich — Goodness to be pos- 
itive, 1749. 
Colored man, old — God found through the 

heart, 1477. 
Colt, Messenger — Man needs restraint, 

423- 
unbroken — Unprofitable energy, 733, 
Columbus and the continent — Infinity in- 
comprehensible, 1 1 30. 

— Unexplored powers of soul, 1086. 
Comet — Effects of soul on others, 800. 
Commanders, inspiration of great — Christ 

the leader, 1276. 
Company — A book, 2436. 
Compass, doubt of, bad as unbelief — The 
Bible, 1870. 
in navigation — Moral principle, 563. 
of ship — Conscience the guide, 1345. 
overboard, voyage to be made — Bible 
destroyed, duty the same, 1969. 
Complementary natures — Church enriched 

by all members, 2084. 
Concordant sounds in symphony — Peace 

and righteousness, 1747. 
Confession frank, disarming — Owning of 

offences, 829. 
Conflagration ; teredo — Sins, great and 
little, 1396. 



606 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Conflicts :ind stupciulous images — Tlio 
Apocalypse, 195 1. 

Conscience — Jolin the Baptist, 1230. 

for churcli, not liome — Department-con- 
science, 1338. 
monkey-cap of — Punishment not actu- 
ated by love, 1282. 

Construction of house — Man-building a 
slow process, 2478. 

Consumption, man with — Unbeliever in 
immortality, 320. 

Contagion — Social effect of feeling, 1459. 

Cookery recipe ^ — -Bible to be tested by ex- 
periment, 1864. 

Cooper, Peter — Wealth used for mankind, 
618. 
with barrel — Rough handling by Provi- 
dence, 645. 

Copernicus — ^ifigher view of Christ, 1223. 

Corn without grain — Christianity without 
love, 1776. 

Cosmetic — Holiness expressed in face, 

1531- 

Cost of liberty — Social gain tlirough suffer- 
ing, 917. 

Counterfeit coin — Almsgiving for reputa- 
tion, hypocrisy, 2393. 

question of — Power of doubt, 1978. 

Country lane, sward and flowers — Careless 
Bible-reading, 1858. 

Counsel to friend — God's willingness to 
help, 1832. 

Counselor — A book, 2436. 

Court, justice's reversed — Conscience, Sun- 
day and week-days, 134 1, 
reception by king and nobles — Walk- 
ing with Christ, 1294. 
room and home — Judge and father, 141. 

Courtesy at home — Personal rights for 
yielding, 924. 

Courts, higher and lower — Spiritual life 
not gauged by senses, 1064. 

Crabs, soft-shelled — Self-help in church- 
making, 21 13. 
sucking joints of — Trying to change 
Apocalyptic figures to ideas, 2262. 

Crack of teamster's whip — Illustrations 
uttered with vigor, 2302. 

Cradle still cherished— Much of Old Testa- 
ment outworn but precious, 1882. 

Craters old and new — Repenting of out- 
grown sins, 141 1. 

Cream and skim-milk — Rich jiraying and 
poor living, 1433. 
on top in dairy — But society moves by 
average mass, 2493. 

Credit, wealthy traveler loses letter of — 
( iod's heirs not poor, 709. 

Critics of spiritual aid — Soul sympathy 
unappreciated, 886. 



Crocodile and mosquitoes — Patience of the 

dull, 421. 
Crocodiles with gnashing teeth — Un- 
charitable refuimers, 2379. 
Cromwell's portrait with wart— Old Testa- 
ment fidelity to truth, 25. 
Crops worked for — Revivals, 2127. 
Crow, carrion — Fault-finders, 778. 

far-heard " caw " of — Orator's voice, 

2294. 
from egg — ContemjH from pity, 2226. 
Crowned — Jesus as Clod, 1219. 
Crutches for lame — Paper-money, 1005, 

weak souls — Externalities of wor- 
ship, 2050. 
Cryptic knowledge in books — Soul-life 

hidden, 1069. 
Crystal and blows — Soul to be protected, 

387- 

bubble — Immortality and earthly 
life, 343- 

Crystallized praise — Compliment, 947. 

Crystals, geologizing for — Adversity re- 
vealing beauty, 646. 

Culture, man of, in slums — God's limi- 
tations in Christ, 1255. 
of soil — Genius must be tilled, 394. 

Curiosity, Yankee driver's — Mind-hunger, 
369- 

Curtain drawn aside — Christ preaching 
retribution, 2250. 

Customer, not scales, cheated — Sin against 
(]od, not law, 1429. 

Cutlery, fine-finished — Artistic goodness, 
461. 

Cutting wax, marble, diamond — Spiritual 
growth slow in proportion to fineness, 
1615. 

Cyclone°center — Peace God's dwelling, 
1 148. 

Daguerreotype=plate— Scenery to be viewed 

receptively, 2551. 
Dana, R. H., Jr., return from voyage — 

Reaction of feeling, 443. 
Dancing'SChool — Virtue to be automatic, 

797- 
Dandelion — Mother's ideal and real out- 
come, 134. 

— Type of resurrection, 331. 
gold — Dishonest success transient, 571. 
mat, circle, and globe — Departed chil- 
dren, 231. 
Daniel's image in the vision — Systematic 

theology, 2196. 
Dante, hell of — Revenge a torment, 427. 
Dark°lantern — Church refusing to touch 

reforms, 2358. 
Darwin, theory of, not with claws but 
tongue— Nagging, 7S3. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



607 



Darwinism — Paul's law of spirit and mem- 
bers, 2235. 
David to Moses as John to Paul — Great 
religious geniuses, 1939. 
with the sling — Independent methods of 
work, 2108. 
Dawn — Conversion, 1539. 

from night — Resurrection of Jesus, 
1251. 
Daylight — Influence of good-nature, 860. 

— Patriotism diffused, 978. 
Dead-heads, none in nature — Success exacts 
effort, 510. 
things not to be stumbling-blocks — 
Victory over past, 1605. 
Deaf man amid music — Heaven in the 

heart, 332. 
Death and resurrection — Business failures 
and recoveries, 680. 
of children — Help only when needed, 
1491. 
Decay of world-forces to make soil — Prodi- 
gality of God, 2241. 
phosphorescence of — Splendor of ill- 
gotten gains, 543. 
Deceit in manufactures — Public conscience 

deteriorating, ion. 
Declaration of independence — Paul's " only 

Clirist crucified," 2342. 
Democrat, the great — God regards all 

alike, 11 22. 
Desert between Israelites and Canaan — 

Transition periods barren, 2461. 
Despot, flagellating — Conscience a pun- 

isher, 1799. 
Destitution, sudden — Unnoted tragedies in 

life, 706. 
Detective — Conscience finds out evil, 1357. 
Devil, the, gone into something else — 
Capital may succeed slavery as 
national evil, 2505. 
poor bargaining with — Folly of dis- 
honesty, 572. 
Dew and ram versus storms — Simple 
pleasures best, 498. 
diamonds of morning — Angelic minis- 
trations to Jesus, 1921. 
distilled from heaven — Knowledge to be 

sought, 513. 
drop beautiful, if evanescent — Imagin- 
ings of faith, 201 1. 
drops — Good deeds, 15 18. 
impartially distributed — The Divine 

mercies, 1 196. 
on flowers — Motherhood changing 
frivolity to joy, 132. 
Diamonds and pearls — Interior ornaments, 
1074. 
ground with diamond dust — Christians 
make Christians, 863. 



Dikes of Holland — Resistance to tempta- 
tion, 1372. 
Disciple, scholar — Christ to be learned, 

1648. 
Disciples of Jesus — Violent conversions not 
needed, 1580. 
the twelve, and John — Native gifts no 
measure-standard, 1738. 
Discords, modulating — Transient troubles, 
689. 
soon modulated to harmony — Friendly 
raillery, 948. 
Diseases and medical science — Sin funda- 
menial in theology, 1382. 
divers — National ailments, 986. 
Dislocated limbs — Sin, disjointed faculties, 

1390. 
Dispersion of Babel regathered — Brother- 
hood America's language, 2522. 
Dissected body not a man — Theology not 

religion, 1461. 
Dissipation, etc. — Excitement a natural de- 
sire, 438. 
Distributed power — Influence of great men, 

2437. 
Divine and human power — Prayer and 

watching, 1829. 
Doctor — Condition of faculties for work, 

388. 
Dog, afiection of — Enthusiasm of love, 1789. 
bark of — Orator's voice, 2294. 
gratitude of; man's ingratitude — Mean- 
ness of intelligent sin, 1428. 
little, at door — Fretting, 741. 
made ugly by stoning — Reforms un- 
wisely driven, 2378. 
man without a — No conscience, 1 331. 
Newfoundland — Good-natured rudeness, 

753- 

of Hindoo barred from heaven — Hymns 
admitted, 2070. 

rebuked for barking, growls — Surly for- 
giveness, 766. 

threatening — Mercy with cheerfulness, 
823. 
Donl<ey°engine — Miracles supplemental, 

1903. 
Door from dreariness to brightness — 
" Nevertheless," 263. 

of future — Easter Sunday, 1252. 

slammed in face — Salvation shown as 
impossible, 2322. 

the one — Christ, not the church, 1284. 
Douglas, Fred'lc, and Sojourner Truth — 

Man's strength in God, 2028. 
Dove among hawks — Meek to inherit 
earth, 1773. 

and its colors — Native constitution per- 
manent, 450. 

or buzzard — Seeking good or evil, 941. 



r)o8 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Drama williout plot— The Apocalypse, 195 1. 
Drinks, ;ii tilicial ; water — Common sense 

better than uncommon, 360. 
Driver on street — Other men's consciences, 

1344- 
Driving near precipice — Temptation marks 

danger-line, 1355. 
Drop and ocean — Human thoughts about 

God, 1 147. 
Drowned man — Spiritual death, 1326. 
Drowning, recovery from — Hope in faint 

beginnings, 1584. 
Drunkard loves the cup — Minister loves 

men, 2281. 
Drunkard's prayers — Moral disability, 

1825. 
Dungeon, man in — Scientific truth refused, 

2231. 
Dunghill bearing white flower — Cruel 

views of God by good men, 2216. 
Dust — Trifles soil life and hide heaven, 

1700. 
children born of the — Parents not to 

think evil, 142. 
in Parthenon cornices — Petty errors in 

Bible, 1965. 
of the sepulcher — Unused wealth, 594. 
on the road — Activity outruns trouble, 

555- 
sifting through cracks — Small vexations 
annoy, 737. 

Dye=vatS and silks — Process and product 
unlike, 1641. 

Dynamite-tubes for blasting — The pas- 
sions, 425. 

Dyspepsia — Bad influences of self-con- 
sciousness, 859. 

Eagle and ant — Labors of genius, 508. 
caged — Drooping old age, 274. 
fledged, free from nest — The Hereafter, 

347- 
no dust on wings of — Exalted moods 

above care, 1701. 
not trained, but pupil is — Christian life 

needs training, 1622. 
on her nest — God's brooding love, 1089. 
Eagles and sparrows — Genius to live su- 
periorly, 15 18. 
Ear, man's, devil's pulpit — Self-deception 

in crooked business, 568. 
Early English history — Old Testament in- 
dispensable, 1877. 
Earth, internal fires of — Fanatical patriot- 
ism of Jews, 977. 
Earthquakes and volcanoes — South Amer- 
ican Republics, 968. 
East wind — Home selfishness, 167 
Eating, regularity in — Soul-regimen, 17 17. 
at the table — I'ower of association, 842. 



Echo in mountains — Homely language 
arouses memories, 2299. 

Eclipse and astronomer — Christ's death 
foreknown by him, 1247. 

Eden in the heart — Love of flowers, 2545. 

Edifice, a great — Kingdom of heaven built 
slowly, 2475. 

Education of slave ; collegian — Fruits of 
Spirit are Christianity, 1457. 

Edwards, Jonathan — Apostolic heresy, 
2190. 

— Genius in theology, 1979. 
— Danger in lofty ideals, 1052. 
— Influence independent of circum- 
stance, 374. 
and his writing-room — Church making 
true men the true church, 2168. 

Effervescence, without — (Querulous Chris- 
tians, 1502. 

Eggs nested too long — Griefs recalled for 
misery, 251. 

Egyptian and Grecian architecture — Tem- 
ple of God in humanity, 2490. 
excavations — Less important than reve- 
lation of the rocks, 2230. 

Elasticity of soul — Capacity to be born 
again, 1586. 

Election-day reason — Saloons to be closed 
on Sunday, 2046. 

Electricity, uses of — Obedience to law 
gives power, 1444. 

Elevation, prospect from — Broad views of 
truth, 105 1. 

Elm, American — Ideal of manhood, 1042. 

Embassy and king — Christianity judged 
by its professors, 1502. 

Embers, raking up — Holding a grudge, 

765- 

Emery destroys surface — Little lies danger- 
ous, 717. 

Emigrants in strange land — Death not 
exile, 308, 
outfit of — Preparation for heaven, 323. 

Emotive man in church activities — Safety 
in expression, 2123. 

Empire throned, self-ruling — Republic, 

975- 
Endowed benefactions — Long-lived be- 
nevolence, 2402, 
Enemy, poisoned darts of — Meekness, 

benevolent bearing of evil, 1752. 
Engine and sails cooperate — Divine and 
human powers, 1311. 
filing up an — ICating, 180. 
in the basement — Lower powers in 

higher life, 368. 
machinery of, well kept — Care of the 

body, 184. 
relation of parts, fuel, etc. — Eating on 
principle, 186. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



609 



l^nglaild in India — Faulty in;>tiiuncnts of 

I'lovidence, 994. 
Eaglish almshouses — Poor-relief to slim 

ulate, not enervate, 2399. 
and French writing — Humanization of 

literature, 2456. 
Enjoyment of nature — Intangible property, 

2553- 

others' gardens — Mind-ownership, 

2552. 

Enlisting under Christ — Duty of church 
membership, 2075. 

Epicure, literary — Selfish morality, 1032. 

Erection of great edifice — Character-build- 
ing, 480. 

Escape from drowning — Mode of con- 
version unimportant, 1582. 

war-captivity — Release from soul- 
bondage, 1590. 

Esprit de corps of army — Of Christianity, 
2150. 

Esquimaux seeking tropics — Repentance 
towards God, 1566. 

Esthetic needs of the soul — Beauty helps 
to spirituality, 2573. 

Euclid, proposition in — Philosopher's God 
not adorable, II 15. 

Europe, church and state in — Democratic 
self-government, 933. 

Evaporation under the sun — Yearnings of 
aspiration, 1329. 

Evolution towards perfectness — Beauty in- 
herently divine, 2572. 

Evolutionary purging from animalism — 
Slow human betterment, 2491. 

Exchange-brokers — Commonplace preach- 
ers, 2271. 

Exhalation from unstopped vase — Un- 
written thoughts, 412. 

Exhibition of sores — Conviction of sin not 
to be displayed, 1570. 

Exiles in heaven — Earthly training often 
valueless for other life, 578. 

Experts in concert-audience — Earthly and 
heavenly praise, 1092. 

Eyes and spectacles — Religion and reason, 
1488. 
feline, in the dark — Sense of humor, 485. 

Fable of lion, wolf and lamb — Teaching 
truth by fiction, 35. 

Fairy purse inexhaustible — God's father- 
hood, man's brotherhood, 2352. 

Faith of child in parent — Trust in God, 
2024. 

Family not subject-race — Unitary idea of 
humanity, 1 125. 
pride — Spiritual ancestry, 1099. 
the — Natural and supernatural Provi- 
dence, 1 167. 



Famous woman and infaiilclass — Preacher 

all things to all, 2284. 
Farm develops stone, gold, etc. — Growing 
scope of Christianity, 1480. 
useless unless cultivated — Bible texts 

1848. 
witliout crops — Negative morality, 1482. 
Farmer and apple-tree — Living by faith, 
2036. 

beau, society and plow — Beauty of 

habit, S35. 
harvest — Preaching tested by ef- 
fects, 15 13. 
summer — Holy Spirit to be utilized, 

1319- 

Farmer's last year crop — Future church 
work needs new effort, 2109. 

Father cheating child with sled — Prayer 
spiritual not material, 1810. 
hard-working, children pampered — Ef- 
fort, source of power, 593. 
in heaven — Disinterested goodness, 

1782. 
in Indian raid — Joy of sacrifice, 7. 
knows but listens to child — Prayer 

pleases God, 1802. 
on earth and in heaven — God's love for 

his children, 1140. 
steering child's rowing — Guidance of 

Providence, 1161. 
to children at boarding-school — God's 
incarnation not strange, 1288. 

Fatherly authority and motherly love — 
Failure of the law, 1244. 

Fatness or leanness— Eating hope or con- 
science, 2003. 

Feathers given away by convert — Selfish 
conscience for others, 135 1. 

Feeling not soap and sand — Quiet conver- 
sions, 1581. 

Fence=building not farming — Doctrinal dis- 
cussion, 21S0. 

Fences — Denominationalism, 2145. 

Fermentation — Opening of young man- 
hood, 46. 

Ferryboat — Salvation through Christ, 
1275. 

Fever-patient cleansed by remedies — 
Church bettered by agitation, 2232. 

Field glass used by man — Heart uses the 
head, 405. 
the place for agricultural science — 
World for Christianity, 1721. 

Filial affection lifts towards God — Lord's 
prayer demands love not awe, 1804. 

Flail-threshing — God's severe dealings, 
677. 

Finney, Dr. C. C, and D. L. Moody — 
Theological and practical preaching, 
2305- 



6io 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Fire — The passions, 1358. 

alarm of — Warning against corruption, 

always fire — buicenty makes no error 

right, 1609. 
and decay — Active and passive evil, 922. 
dangerous but needful — Abhorrence, 

'379- 
engine — Rich cliurch giving while get- 
ting. 2359. 
glowing after early flame — Character in 

age, 275. 
hottest after smoke and flame — Intensity 

in religion, 2128. 
kindling, on fuel — Influence, excitation 
not creation, 437. 

wood — Aspiration of prayer, God- 
ward, 1805. 
needs air — Religious inquirer needs 

sympathy, 1558. 
not food — Devotion not piety, 1464. 
of shavings — Preaching without solid 

thought, 2330. 
pillar of — Concentrated patriotism, 978. 
raked-up — Latent sin, 1399. 
rescue from — Creat feelings for great 
occasions, 416, 

of chilli from — Great thoughts de- 
stroy small troubles, 665. 
simmering over — Devotional exercises 

not finding Christ, 1556. 
warmth of— Personal power, 862. 
Firefly, intermittent — Christian for Sun- 
day only, 1740. 
not star — Man of few talents, 358. 
Fish baited with what they like — Catching 
men, 2312. 
coming up to breathe — Sabbath for 

workingmen, 2041. 
dressing, for food — Discrimination 
among men, 940. 
Fisherman, the best, most fish — -The best 

minister, 2315. 
Fishing-tackle, manufacturer of, and fish- 
ing — Theologizing and preaching, 

2313- 

Five Points children — Willingness, ground 
of adoption, 1571. 

Flaihbearing faiths — Future church loving 
not fighting, 2160. 

Flame, small, blown out ; large, increased 
— Love in the heart, 1642. 

Flanking the enemy — Indirect tempta- 
tion, 1373. 

Flax and white raiment — Issue of tribu- 
lation, 650. 
fiber rotting — God's severe dealings, 
677. 

Floating battery, unbalanced — Dispropor- 
tioned natures, 471. 



Floods in Connecticut — Blessing in adver- 
sity, 634. 
Florence Nightingale — Woman's servitude 

in luve, a glory, 97. 
Florist and summer — Holy Spirit to be 
utilized, 13 19. 
study of flowers by — Minister's study of 
human nature, 2283. 
Flower, a — Border line between material 
and immaterial, 2577. 

in and out of Bible — The Book in- 
terpreted by world, 1837. 
and floral system — Greater evidence of 

design, 1 128. 
bed, God's — Sick-bed may be, 212. 
growing amid grass — Christian outside 

of church, 2088. 
in desert — Parable of Eden as a fact, 
2209. 

rock-cleft — Piety in unlikely condi- 
tions, 2143. 
perfume — Influence unconscious, 854. 
pot and soil without seeds — Bodily health 

without spiritual, 211. 
white, out of black dirt — Faith growing 
out of itlolatry, 2459. 
Flowers — Beauty of woman made for de- 
light, 95. 
always dressed up — Every day good- 
ness, 1504. 
and botany — Influence of visible good- 
ness, 1503. 

frost — The soul to be protected, 

387-. 
beside glacier — Sweetness in adversity, 

691. 
calyx and seed of — Marriage for this 

world only, 125. 
cut or growing — Morality root of reli- 
gion, 1035. 
folding at night — Act of dying, 295. 
from garden — Gifts of the heart, 801. 
given away — Home-happiness to be 

shared outside, 176. 
imagined on other vocations — Complaint 

of calling unmanly, 580. 
in blossom and fragrance — Young love, 
100. 
button-hole — Spiritual qualities not 

abundant, 1674. 
the world — Cheerful traits in re- 
ligion, 500. 
large and small in bouquet — Worth of 

each in his place, 2499. 
mean sentiment — Words mean what 

they make men think of, 2576. 
not practically useful — Gross measure- 
ments of value, 2564. 

soils — Church exclusiveness, 2174. 
on cofliii — I^ife, time for kind words, 805. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



611 



Flowers, varied but all children of sun — 
Sects, 2152. 
varieties — Man susceptible of cultivation, 

75- 
yet growing — Old Testament values, 
1879. 
Fly and bee — Quality and activity, 548. 

beaver — Happiness in achieve- 
ment, 552. 
on glass, lions in moon — Conceit mag- 
nifies its own, 761. 
pestereil by a — Fretting, foolish, 744. 
Fogs of Newfoundland — Cheerlessness of 

doubt, 1 97 1. 
Foliage, sununer and autumn, gone — 
Transitoriness of life, 501. 
summer and winter view — Prosperity 
obscuring vision, 620. 
Food — Amusement to be discriminated, 

54- 
change of — Variety needed by man, 

2039. 
wasted — Youthful excesses, 60. 
Fool convicted of ignorance — Conceit in 

morality, 1543. 
Footprint, all feet to fit — Enforcing uni- 
form beliefs, 1973. 
Footsteps washed out by tide — Religious 

reverie, 1545. 
Fords in the West — Folly of fear, 1995. 
Forecastle and college — Varying social 

standards, 937. 
Forest guide — Faith is trust, 2008. 

in the — Christ, sure leader, 1262. 
lost in the — Partial views of God, 

I132. 
overgrown — Humanity without religion, 

144 1, 
timber — Use of Bible good or bad, 

1871. 
unseen wood carvings in — Blind read- 
ing of Bible, 1857. 
Forgeries, early — Persistence of deeds 

done, 1420. 
Forget=me-aot sprig to maiden — Love- 
tokens to Christ, 1277. 
Fortifications — Civil institutions limit 

power, 961. 
Fossil fern — Trifles in Bible often sig- 
nificant, 1874. 
Foundation not building — Conversion not 
edification, 1617. 
of house — Morality not enough, 1022. 
neighbor's house — Social liability, 
419. 
Fountain, a — A man of health, 177. 
Fountains of influence — Meekness harmon- 
ized power and peace, 1 100. 
Fowls of the air — Providence of work, 
5'7- 



Fragrance betrays flowers — Atmosphere of 
Christian household, 165. 
of grape-vine — Good-nature evident, 
806. 

hidden blossoms — Effluence of 

goodness, 1072. 
magnolia — Sharing good things, 

417- 
Frederick the Great — Labors of genius, 508. 
Freight'-train's head-light — Christians only 

towards heaven, 1522. 
French, reading and speaking — Bible to be 

practiced, 161 2. 
Fresco estimated by weight of pigment — 
Apocalypse and arithmetic, 1949. 
in water-colors — Temporal love, 175. 
of future — Prophets appealed to imagi- 
nation, 1901. 
Freshet and good tilling — National ex- 
citements, 979. 
escaped — Earthly conditions forgotten in 

heaven, 348. 
in the soul — Revival of religion, 2132. 
Friction in machinery — Anxiety, 2022. 

of the mind — Care, 736. 
Friend in household — Peaceful presence of 
Jesus, 1274. 
not magistrate — Coming to Christ, 1287. 
Frost early, on autumn leaves — Sorrow 
matures, 261. 
picture beautiful if evanescent — Imag- 
inings of faith, 201 1. 
jiictures and painting — Hunger for con- 
tinuance, 342. 

from Divine gift of beauty — The 

great Artist, 2575. 
on window — Flimsy excuses, 1408. 
ripens fruits and nuts — Sorrow sweetens, 

268. 
sweetens nuts — Persecution sours some 
men, 670. 
Fruit after pruning — Recuperation under 
adversity, 669. 
for eating, not whole tree — Good in 

every man, 446. 
from orchard — Tokens of divine inter- 
course, 1 5 10. 
guarded by wall — Compulsory toler- 
ation, 151 1. 
hanging over wall — Preachers from 

other denominations, 2163. 
matured by light and heat — Power of 

Holy Spirit, 1 320. 
not ripened by fire and bellows — Good- 
ness not a sudden growth, 1607. 
on lofty trees — Last Supper discourses 

of Jesus, 1935. 
plucked when ripe — Glory of death, 303. 
rijiened after frost — Sweetness after ad- 
versity, 635. 



6l2 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Fruit, ri|Kiiiiig of — Influence higher tlian 
authority, 472. 

shadowed by leaves — Spirituality hin- 
dered by ecclcsiasticism, 2154. 

tree — A book, 2436. 

trees, early and late — Varied ripening- 
time of truths, 2208. 

varieties of — Man susceptible of culture, 

75- 
FMiitfulness in single trees — Individual 

spirituality, 1534. 

Fuel and flame — Morality and spirituality, 
1019. 

Fuagl on trees — Business depressions de- 
moralizing, 700. 

Furnace and registers — Piety may be par- 
tial, 1472. 
glow of — Soul manifested, 1079. 
of machine — Stomach as related to 
head, 187. 

Furnishing of home as to children — Meas- 
urement of worldly things, 1732. 

Furrow, daisy in the — Certainty of trouble, 
630. 
for seed — Opportunity for doing good, 
1520. 

Galileo — Higher view of Christ, 1223. 

— Theological transitions dawn of 
great future, 2233. 
Gambler contributing on Sunday — Sacrifice 
of wicked, abomination, 2055. 
trying to reform — Time for Christian 
help, 1559. 
Gambling saloons — Spider's web, 56. 
Garden — A book, 2436. 

and farm — Single virtues and character, 

1655- 

crops — Spiritual grace to be cultivated, 

1695-. 
geometric, and forest — Religious excite- 
ment not indecorous, 1499. 
not created — Bible to aid in, not solve, 

man's perplexities, 1967. 
with flowers — A singing church, 2061. 
Gardener for market — Self-seeking friend- 
ship, 768. 
Gardening for ilie public eye — Fidelity to 

duty, 525. 
Garments — Quarreling as preparation for 
heaven, 170. 

— Religion not a make-shift, 1445. 
inflammable, amid fire — Young minister 

amid praise, 2306. 
to fit wearer — Inspiration progressively 
adapted, 2191. 
Gas-mains, working in- — Insensibility to 

evil, 1418. 
Gate and the pickets — Man's ineptness, 
541- 



Gate open to enemy — Yes, 1376. 

the ]iearly — Beauty of death, 298. 
Gates to New Jerusalem — Ways of sal- 
vation various, 2261. 
Gauze and fire — The soul to be protected, 

387. 

Gem of devotion — Lord's Prayer crystal- 
lization of others, 1933. 

Genealogies — Inspired Biblical use of un- 
inspired material, 1886. 

General of army — Faith in trust, 2008. 

Generous comradeship in evil — Judgment 
by general aim, 1033. 
man — Ground of forgiveness in God's 
nature, 1205. 

Genie escaped from bottle — The vote, 931. 

Genius for music and poetry — Benevolence 
in God, 1 145. 

Geode and crystal — Present and future 
knowledge, 2179. 

Geometrical figures for clouds — T>ogical 
preaching to the imaginative, 2325. 

German legend — Conditions of salvation, 
not impossible, 2257. 
Protestantism — Principles of, 2156. 

Gestures of orator — Miracles of Jesus, 
1232. 

Giant chords in German castle — Deep 
emotion uncommon, 418. 

Gilding, superficial — Sudden learning, 

2434- 
their own chariots — Rich selfish 

churches, 2360. 
Girl of eighteen — Heroism in illness, 

219. 
taking dinner to cathedral workman — 

Humble helper, 522. 
Giving a quarter ; helping a life — Alms ; 

benevolence, 2405. 
Glaciers, downward movement of — De- 
generacy, 1413. 
sliding down a — Escape from evil 

courses improbable, 14 16. 
softened by warmth — Tears give relief 

in sorrow, 228. 
Gladstone — Excessive activity, 582. 
Gleaning, God's, saves our losses for us — 

Losing and finding, 352. 
Glutton loves food — Minister loves men, 

2281. 
Goblet with wine of life — Sky on morning 

after storm, 1253. 
" God be with you," shrunk to a skin — 

Good-bye, 808. 
God's handiwork and worship not enough 

— Longing for God, 11 17. 
Goetbe — Obligations of genius to lofty life, 

373- 
on critics of Faust — Christianity, original 
and improved, 2193. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



613 



Gold alloyed — Moderate nioralily, 1036. 
bearing quartz— Cluircli valuable though 

imperfect, 68. 
mining, crushing, smelling — Training by 

trouble, 668. 
newly dug, not new — Bible truths, 

1841. 
not dross — Related experiences in meet- 
ing to be the best, 2120. 
of eighteen carats — Truth-telling adulter- 
ated, 720. 
ore, in crucible — Knowledge variable in 
value, 2258. 

throwing away — Rejection of Old 
Testament, 1890. 
particles to miner — Good beginnings en- 
couraging, 1023. 
prospecting for — Search for divine wis- 
dom, 1 1 10. 
seeking — Bible to be searched for treas- 
ure, 1855. 
separated from ore — New truth cleared 

from error, 2350. 
streaked through rock — Divine good- 
ness found by the good, 2395. 
veined in rock — Ideal of love, no. 
Good fellow and religious man — Men 
judged by their own standards, 474. 
Samaritan — Balm before criticism, 881. 
Goods for grain — Interchange of theologies, 

2220. 
Goose on a spit — Self-absorption, 398. 
Gormandizing food — Wickedness of selfish 

culture, 2457. 
Governor and governed — Calvinism and 

Armenianism, 2201. 
Graces, opening of Christian — Christian 

development, 1620. 
Grafts overgrown by tree — Grace over- 
come by nature, 15 19. 
Grain harvested here ; next crop — The 
earthly and the heavenly, 339. 
ripe but not sown — Thinkers who do 

not speak in meeting, 21 16. 
sown for harvest — Giving and receiving, 

2389. 
worth straw and husk — Self-examina- 
tion advisable, 147 1. 
Granite, barren — Church members " mis- 
understood," 2104. 
Grant — Military Americans in civil office, 

988. 
Grape-cluster and wine — Perpetuity of the 

Bible, 1912. 
Grapes, black Hamburg — Holy Spirit 
specially used, 1316. 
changed to wine — God in Christ a 

moral force, not an idea, 1151. 
crushed to wine — Beneficence of ad- 
versity, 638. 



Grass and trees must be dilTercnt — Brother- 
hood does not im])ly equality, 2495. 
blades of — Little virtues, 798. 
Grave clothes to be removed — Soul resur- 
rection, 1542. 
stones — Sins repented of, 1567. 

and sculptor's clay — Past and fu- 
ture, 1568. 
Great-grandfather's apple-stealing — Re- 
sponsibility for Adam, 2212. 
Greed judging equity — Flesh discerning 

spirit, 1062. 
Greek and barbarian, Jew and Gentile, 
etc. — Every Christian a Jew in Christ, 
2082. 

Hebrew ideas of God — God's emo- 
tion, 1213. 
esthetical feelings — Conceptions of God, 

gods in Louvre — Divine memorials in 

Bible, 1963. 
statues — Manhood the beauty of man, 

79- 
Greenhouse without furnace — Religion 

without love, 1478. 
Gridley, Dr. — Curative effect of cheerful- 
ness, 494. 
Guide gone, path the same — Man's duty 

and the Bible destroyed, 1969. 
Grindstone — Discipline of trouble, 636. 
— Mistakes sharpen men, 399. 
— This world, 626. 
Ground=springs under foundation — Native 

benevolence irrepressible, 241 1. 
Growing pains — Origin of evil with God, 

1 127. 
Gulls flying with the wind — Yielding to 

God, 1618. 
Gun ill-loaded — Unloving conscience, 1334. 

without powder — Unpopular law, 967. 
Gutter, philosophers of the — Anarchists 

and communists, 996. 
Gypsies in fine house — Folly of indulging 

passions, 1398. 

Hail on slate roof — Long words to chil- 
dren, 34. 

Hand of Holy Ghost on heart — Apostolic 
succession, 2278. 
untrained or skillful — Human nature 
right if used aright, 1563. 

Handwriting — Lower law a step towards 
higher law, 2465. 

Hangman of divine government — Fear, 
1991. 

Harlot — Evil disguised, 770. 

Harlotry of wickedness — Evil wit, 771. 

Harness — Christian training, 1633. 

and pads — Grief in unexpected places, 
682. 



614 



INDEX OF ILLUSrilATIONS 



Harness increases strength— Law helps 
human force, 954. 
over-tight— Doctrinal difficulties, 2183. 
Harp anil harper — Man's growth and 
divine influence, 1300. 

— Tenii)ted and tempter, 1352. 
chords broken — Soul-destroying greed, 

5S1. 
strings slack — Joyless religion, 492. 
without strings — Selling one's self, 
614, 
Hard in business, generous at home — 

Variations of sympathy, 2396. 
Harvest and atmosphere — Human growth 
and God, 1330. 
in Illinois — Modern increase of fine 

character, 2529. 
to be cultivated — Promises to be earned, 
2030. 
Hat off to a lady — Spiritual impulse su- 
perior to law, 1686. 
jnilled down — Self-examination, 400. 
Haven after storm — Peace through Christ, 

"73- 
Hazael — Preparation for crime, 1400. 
Head, top not bottom of — Love of praise for 

nol)le things, 898. 
Headless tly — Man without faith, 2007. 
Health and hospital — Righteousness a 

natural law, 1473. 
Heart, hardeninjj of, softening of the brain 

— Money crazes more than religion, 

559- 
varnish — Liiagination beautifies homeli- 
ness, 529. 

Heat must radiate — Activity of Christian 
faith, 2026. 
wiiite, in brain — Power of enthusiasm, 
869. 

Heathen forsaking idols — Religious de- 
velopment misjudged, 1494. 

Hedgehog — Self-judgment through others. 

Hell, prayer-meeting in — Religious de- 
spair, 1491. 
Heloise — Spiritual kindred, 173 1. 
Help only when needed — Death of chil- 
dren, 220. 
Hen brooding chickens — Christ's love for 
his enemies, 1272. 
cackling over egg — Not model for gen- 
erous giving, 2409. 
in barnyard — The unthinking minister, 

2293. 
seeking roosting-place — Minister hunt- 
ing position, 2307. 
Hercules and Socrates — Physical and moral 
courage, 473. 

the serpents — Evils in society can 
be destroyed, 2381. 



Heroism appreciated by heroic instinct— 
(lod known through man's best quali- 
ties, 1 154. 

Hickorynut germinating — Prophecy of 
good time coming, 2468. 

Hicks, the portrait-painter — Human soul 
but beginning of perfection, 2413. 

Hide of self-conceit — Religious pride, 762. 

Hills ahead, but slight ascents — Needless 
worry, 743. 

Hlnd'Sight and fore sight of rifle — Present 
and future, 1682. 

Hoe and catechism — Bondage of body and 

brain, 2040. ■ 

Hogs of Gadara — Reformation of passions, ^ 
1564. 

Holes stopped in ship of state — Taxation 
for education, 2419. 

Home light opened on winter night — 
Twenty-third Psalm, 1908. 

Homer still chanting — Poesy immortal, 
2451. 

Honey from lions — Sweet-souled men, with 
barbaric views of God, 2217. 
in deep flowers — Highest joys hardest 

to get, 1745. 
not bitterness from flowers — Retrospec- 
tion to be helpful, 1758. 

Hooded blossom — Government fits the peo- 
ple, 957. 

Horizon of immortality — New ideals given 
by Christ, 1048. 

Horizon, bright, after storm — Splendor of 
hope for the world, 2544. 

Horse, country, at hitching-post — Careless 
minister in pulpit, 2297. 
fine qualities of, disciplined — Training 

of character, 428. 
fractious — Young passions to be trained, 

not suppressed, 47. 
kept at livery — Irritable man, 809. 
spavined and feeble — Safety in lack of 

religious excitement, 2130. 
tlioroughbred — American political elas- 
ticity, 989. 
under rider — Bodily exercise, 206. 
well-broken — Training to calmness, 367. 

Horseback riding — Experiments in re- 
ligion, 1550. 

Horses, driving fiery — Prayer and self-help, 
1827. 
taming wild — Brains and natural law, 

2557- 
Hospital diet discriminated — Ministers not 

preaching all they believe, 2344. 
for the sick — Church for sinners, 2090. 
luxuries instead of medicine — Exclusive 

preaching, 2324. 
patients quarreling — Church members 

discordant, 2078. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



615 



Hospital work for pay and for son — Love 

lightens labor, 135. 
Hospitality proffered — (iod's promises 

earnest, 121 1. 
Hotel lodgers — Church lack of Christian 
sympathy, 2098. 
table — Christian truth for all men, 1660. 
Housebuilding and home-making — The 
home is the family, 158. 

a slow process — Patience in reform, 
2362. 
destroyed to feed fireplace — Stimulants, 

I95-. 

fine, inmate bad — Physical beauty, 
moral depravity, 460. 

poorly built — Reputation without char- 
acter, 893. 

unoccupied — Indolence breeds morbid- 
ness, 312. 

without roof — Physical and social right- 
eousness not spirituality, 1027. 
Household growth from love and wedlock 
— Church a natural development, 

2134- 
economy — Sects for specific variation, 

generic unity, 2160. 
peace, parental vigils — Suffering the 
price of good, 658. 
Huguenots — Glory out of obscurity, 657. 
Hulks, old — Men of pride, 759. 
Human growth of Jesus — Youthful eclipse 
of Christ, 1229. 
management of nature — Providence and 

law, 2556. 
race — The Bible a growth, 1837. 
Humor, sense of — Human nature organ- 
ized for variety, 2188. 
Hunger and thirst — Importunate longing 

for goodness, H03. 
Husbandman in spring — Time and tasks, 

537- 
works and waits — Impatience in per- 
sonal career, 731. 
Husk of corn — Spiritual value of secular- 
ities, 545. 

— World-life helps soul-life, 1658. 
externality — Disputes on form of 
baptism, 1923. 
Huss — Power of weakness allied witli 

God, 2356. 
Hyacinth — Brief young attachments, 107. 
Hymn, a solemn, before service — The 
Beatitudes, 1932. 
writer of one genuine — Poesy immortal, 
2451. 

Iceberg — Unsympathetic God admirable 
not lovable, 1134. 
sailing on an — Scientific truth without 
gospel, 2231. 



Identity, faculties, better conditions — 
Things hoped for in immortality, 

354- 
Idol worshiping — Love of money, 607. 
Idolatry not condemned — Necessity of 

loving, 1787. 
"I give you joy, my darling" — Child- 
death greeted with peace, 224. 
Illegitimacy — Humiliation of Christ, 1226. 
Illness, mother's sacrifice in — Great feel- 
ings for great occasions, 416. 
Imagination shrines dead child ever as 

child — Baby lost is kept, 262. 
Incense— Silent prayer, 1807. 
Independent or Congregational Protestant- 
ism — Principles of, 2156. 
Index, a copious, to Life of Christ — The 

Gospels, 1920. 
Indian attacks — Watch temptation at dan- 
gerous hour, 1362. 
famine, aid for — Brotherhood growing, 

2530. 
under torture — Heroism of silence, 96. 
Indictment destroyed — God's forgiveness 

absolute, 1207. 
Indolent youth ignorant of work — Thoughts 

and things, 519. 
Infection spreading — Corrupters of the 

young, 1402. 
Infectious disease — Youth's exposure to 

vice, 52. 
Inherited estate — Health to be preserved, 

182. 
Initiation into secret society — Religion not 

mysterious, 1456. 
" In Memoriam " — Sympathetic moods for 

reading, 2450. 
Inquisition, the — Conscience with other 

faculties, 1340. 
Insects on lighthouse lantern — Dimming 

conscience, 1349. 
Inspiration — Temptation suggestive not 

com])ulsory, 1353. 
Instructor and education — Holy Spirit, 

1302. 
in algebra — Spiritual guidance, 1323. 
Instrument in orchestra — Individual power 

of social evil, 920. 
Instruments discordant — American and 

European amusement, 1000. 
Intermissions in science — Decline of 

church-going, 2167. 
Intoxication, effects of — Physical pain a 

moral lesson, 191. 
Invisible pictures revealed by death — 

Children's ministry to memory, 42. 
Inventor genius in physical ideas — 

Preacher in moral ideas, 2274. 
Investments at interest — Work of teacher 

most profitable, 2415. 



6i6 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Investments uiimarkctablc — Worth in the 

other world, 316. 
Iron columns— Many late marriages, III. 
for tempering — Substance in character, 

1644/ 
haniLs— Spirituality AND morality, 1041. 
molten, in foundry — Excitement of 

hijjher feelings, 1553. 
ore — Use of Bible good or bad, 1871. 
unworked, worthless — Sliirking duty 

means disuse, 550. 
welded in heat — Fervency makes think- 
ing antl doing easy, 554. 
work at Niiremberg — Sorrow exercising 
men, 264. 
Isaiah— Tolitics in the pulpit, 2348. 
Italy and charity — Unwise giving makes 
mendicancy, 2398. 

Jacob's ladder — Earthly undertakings 
should aim at heaven, 1599. 

Jails and honest men — Law aims at 
liberty, 955. 

January follows August — Ignorance in- 
vites tyranny, 958. 

Jelly, cooked fruit not strained for — 
Church members imperfect, 2073. 

Jeremiah— Politics in the pulpit, 2348. 

Jesus after and before ascension — Spiritual 
union, 1082. 
and the Pharisees — Intelligent in- 
humanity, 883. 
in books, laws, and institutions — In- 
direct influence, 2439. 
representations of God by, and by He- 
brews — Jehovah, 1 150. 

Jew and gentile — Every Christian a Jew in 
Christ, 2082. 
medieval — Outward and inward life, 
1286. 

Jewel case for God's bride — The Beati- 
tudes, 1523. 

John to Paul as David to Moses — Great 
religious geniuses, 1939. 

John the Baptist — Disturbance the price 
of progress, 2371. 

— New truths from single men, 

2355- 
plowman before Christ — Reform pre- 
ceded by agitation, 2369. 

Joan of Arc — Inspiration of heroism, 1098. 

Johnson, Dr., and John Bunyan — Com- 
plexity and simplicity of style, 2299. 

Joseph of Arimathea — The higher courage, 
1249. 

Joist, imperfect, in building — Bible inde- 
pendent of any one book, i960. 

Joseph, Saint — Negative goodness, 870. 

Joshua's severities — (Jld Testament judged 
by the New, 1895. 



Joy — Interpretation of language by life, 
2440. 
not flattery — Source of praise to God, 
2058. 
Judge and father — Court room and home, 
141. 
captious, on bench — A God of law, 

"43- 
pedantic, and loving God — Divine law 
and divine mercy, 2255. 

Judgment-seat — False witness, 788. 

Judgments of law and of love — Measuring 
(ilher people's children and our own, 
24. 

Justice known by conscience — Feeling be- 
fore reason, 407. 

Kaulbach's painting — Spiritual conflicts, 
1 6 10. 

Kentucky caves— Self-building of soul, 1635. 

Kettle-holes worn by rocks — Persistent 
troubles, 684. 

Key — Dictionary, 1838. 

to Christianity — Divine paternity, 1177. 
clock — Bible guide of moral char- 
acter, 1863. 

Kindling a fire — Spirituality a late de- 
velopment, 1706. 

Kindlings gathered for fire — Prayer-meet- 
ing not to be scattered, 2121. 

Kindly nurse, parental order — Obedience 
to love and to law, 2253. 

King robbing subjects — Manufacturing de- 
ceit, lOII. 

Kings gone on pilgrimages — People the 
rising power, 2525. 

Kite-string — Small Bible texts with great 
meaning, 1911. 

Kitten chasing its tail — Profitless explana- 
tions, 894. 

Knife, assassin's and surgeon's — Right and 
wrong variable, 1039. 

Knighthood — Nobility recognized, not 
made, by outward honors, 477. 

Knitting-machine that does not knit — Neg- 
ative morality, 14S2. 

Knot, tangled — Business complications, 

558. 
Knotted rope — How to end quarrels, 764. 
Knotty timber and white pine — Strong 

character takes best polish, 476. 
Knowledge and schoolhouse — Religion 

and church, 1489. 
Knox, John — Apostolic heresy, 2190. 
Kossuth in New York — Hero-worship, 

1047. 

Lackey of the soul — Conscience, 1346. 
Ladder — Symbols and rituals, 1257. 
for the children — Large family, 160. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



617 



Lamb to the slaughter — Godless woman 

entering marriage, 106. 
Lamp and sun — The Divine fullness, 1200. 
fed by student's marrow — Mind-work at 

night, 392. 
light of — Soul manifested, 1079. 
needs oil — ^Jesus at Emmaus desired 

invitation, 1254. 
of science — High results of commerce, 

588. 
sacred, in temple — Inward and outward 

light, 17 1 2. 
shedding light — True Christianity, 1448. 
Lamps burned out — Transitory affections, 

380. 
Lanced by chance sentence — Habits re- 
vealed, 710. 
Landscape gardening — Native qualities to 
be used, 1651. 
rough and romantic, is attractive — Strong 
characters, 85. 
Lash for steed of industry — Fear, 1990. 
Lark-squab beautiful to parent — Baby to 

its mother, 2. 
Lava-soil — Pride softened by love, 17 19. 
Lead for tools — Sincerity and wrong be- 
lief, 1977. 
heaving the — Depth of character, 907. 
Leaf, fall of, affecting universe — Efiects of 
life on the soul, 357. 
on a stream — Savage life, 551. 
Laws of electricity — Vital elements of 

Bible universally accepted, 1889. 
Lawyer — Condition of faculties for work, 
388. 
study of human nature by — By min- 
ister, 2283. 
Leader — Salvation through Christ, 1275. 
Leaf in eddy of stream — Conscience in 

Romans VII, 1941. 
Leaking grain-wagon — Unconscious good- 
ness, 1744. 
Learning and intelligence — Liberty not 

dangerous, 960. 
Leaves, before the wmd — Lack of moral 
purpose, 1020. 
dead, and fresh growth — The sceptic for 

betterment, 1983. 
dying, disappear — Imperfections to be 

forgotten, 2000. 
of leguminous plant — Body food for the 

soul, 1018. 
wind-blown — Remnants of human life, 
678. 
Legal expositions in nursery — Bible 

adopted to original readers, 1 88 1. 
Lens, every dollar a — Money deviously 

gotten, 568. 
Letter from lost lover — Influence the meas- 
ure of value, 858. 



Letter from friend — The evcr-prescut 
Christ, 1278. 
mailing a — Prayer not needing formal 

address, 1833. 
of introduction — A man's trouble, 878. 
through mail-carrier — Missions through 
commerce, 2094. 
Lettuce — Quick maturity, quick decay, 

1639. 
Levitical eatings, etc. — Rites to be re- 
spected, not obligatory, 2139. 
Liar, diplomatic, of the soul — Conscience, 

1346. 
Lifeboat — Simplicity of salvation, 1549. 
for individuals ; world-saving — Theories 
of religion, 1443. 
Life insurance — Religion not mechanical, 
1462. 
power needed in church — Curative force 

of nature in man, 2176. 
preservers — Emergency-religion, 1526. 
Light by day and night — Constancy of 
God's goodness, 1216. 
houses to mariner — Divine guidance a 

privilege, 1324. 
in darkness — Motherly love in illness, 
218. 

window — Christian to show good- 
ness, 1516. 
killing darkness, theory and example — 

Living epistles, 1509. 
must travel — Activity of Christian faith, 

2026. 
rain and air — God's abundance, 1191. 
rays and sun — God as center, 1704. 
sought by cellar-plant — Joy longed for 
by soul, 495. 
Lighthouse without light — Churches with- 
out Christlike members, 2091. 
Lightning at night — Transient aspirations, 

1437- 
heat — Looks remembered, 1234. 
Liking and loving — Wishing and willing, 

1653- 

Lilies of the field — Providence of work, 518. 

Liliputian and Brobdignagian — Leveling 
tendency of gospel, 970. 

Lincoln, way of — Value of a good name, 
902. 

Links in chain — Steadfastness, 468. 

of God — Human work unfinished 
but continued, 2482. 

Lion and bear nature — Chinese ill-treated 
in America, 2523. 
cubs to be watched — Wealthy corpo- 
rations in politics, loio. 

Livingstone's experience with lion — Bor- 
rowing trouble, 681. 

Loaf of society sliced vertically — Church 
membership, 2079. 



6i8 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Lobes of a seed — Tarables of Jesus often 
cryptic, 2448. 

Locomotive engine — Miracles caused be- 
lief in invisible, 1904. 
sparks — Unconscious influence, 856. 

Log, scjuarc end of a — Loveless conscience, 
8S2. 

Lombardy poplar — Upper and lower life, 
1080. 

London Tower, torture machines and arms 
— Evil powers of the soul, 734. 

Loom and rugniakers — Evolution grander 
than creation, 2237. 
threads broken in — Plans destroyed, 

639- 
weaving — Providence in nature, 1 163, 

Lovable man with burglar — Character not 
judged by single traits, 470. 

Love for one's wife not mathematically 
demonstrable — God transcends knowl- 
edge, 2012. 

Lover; mother — God symbolized in human 
affection, 1185. 

Loving a woman — Self-deception in Chris- 
tian hope unlikely, 1601. 
enemies yesterday and to-day — Stead- 
fast ideals, 1668. 

Lubricating oil — Trust in God, 2022. 

Luther — New truth from single men, 

2355- . 

— Victory from defeats of pred- 
ecessors, 534. 
Lying boy with manly man — Influence 
of cliaracter, 865. 
to children about medicine — God 
says affliction not joyous but grievous, 
234- 

Machinery, doing good by, omits person- 
ality — Danger of organized charity, 
2404. 
enlarged manhood — Benefaction of in- 
ventors, 2531. 
new — Learning to live, 1623. 

Madeleine church of the, Paris — Class feel- 
ing in churches, 2099. 

Madonna, the — Typical mother, 151. 

Maelstrom — Temptation to be avoided, 
'356. 

Magic lantern pictures — Persons associated 
with Jesus, 1934. 

Magistrate and motiier — Judgment by law 
and by love, 2247. 

Magnet — Unconscious influence, 854. 
and iron — Bible readers find their own 

affniities, 1849. 
with iron in sand — Discoveries of grati- 
tude, 1096. 

Magnolia blossom and root — Top and 
bottom of society, 934. 



A\agnolia in blossom — Unconscious beauty 
of Christ spirit, 1792. 
stem and blossom — Morality and piety, 
1474. 
Maiden and lover — Expression increases 
emotion, I577. 
become mother — Love transfoiming 

selfishness, 1602. 
thoughtless — Dallying with temptation, 

1363- 
Mainspring of civilization — Health, 178. 

watch— Home the motive power, 

173- 
— Love the one thing needful, 

1791. 
— Passions and appetites funda- 
mental, 193. 

Maize ripened and reaped — The hope in 
death, 295. 

Malaria — Silent corrupting forces, 1369. 
from new ground — New aspects of truth 
unsettling, 2349. 

Mallet — Sincerity drives home good or 
mischief, 1977. 

Mammon, demon of — American perils, 
1002. 

Man killed for sake of corpse — Piety sacri- 
ficed to save church, 2101. 

Mankind — The body of Christ, 879. 

Manna and the Israelite — Blessings de- 
spised, 1 197. 

Manoah's wife — Child-education for great 
things, 2416. 

Man's body and mind — Natural law and 
C]od, 2555. 

Mansion built and occupied — Good life 
completed, 276. 

Manure-heap — Wealth to be diffused, 602. 

Map— The Bible, i860. 

not a dissected — The Gospel history, 
1920. 

Maple sugar sap forming in tree — Invisible 
growths of good, 2479. 

— Sweetness under injury, 817. 

Marbles, basket of — Physical researches 
without evolution, 2236. 
not nuts — Problems of Calvinism, 2202. 

March of creation — Upward movement of 
the ages, 2542. 

Marine shells on mountain-top — Most be- 
liefs hypothetical, 2238. 

Marksman almost hit mark — Morality in- 
complete, 1025. 

Marriage service — Christ confessed, 1547. 

Marrow— Sympathy for man indispensable 
in ministry, 2353. 

Alarsh'-lights, miasmatic — Passions puri- 
fied, 1075. 

Martineau, Harriet — Annihilation un- 
natural idea, 338. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



619 



Martinet, boy cliant^ed to — Tlicological 
transformation of Bible, 1956. 

Mary Magdalene — Expression by deeds, 
1080. 
and disciples — Sordidness judging 
sentiment, 406. 

Mask — Conscience covers evil and good, 

1335- 
religious — Churchly cant, 2103. 

Maternal ante-natal sustenance — God 
working in us, 1091. 

Mathematical instruments — Character to 
be polished, 17 14. 

Mathematics or moral truth — Personality 
in the preacher, 2272. 

Matterhorn and lesser peaks — Great and 
minor experiences, 1756. 

Maturity, legal — Divine justice considerate 
as human, 1182. 

May not January— Tlie present an era for 
gladness, 2539. 

Mean man enjoys saving a life — Pleasure 
of doing good, 2394. 
man's generosity — Self-gratulation on 
past religion, 2126. 

Measles — Suppressed repudiation, 1004. 

Mechanic loves inventions and machines — 
Minister loves men, 2281. 

Mechanical vv'hittling out of world — Evo- 
lution sublimer conception, 2243. 

Medical book read for cure — Bible for 
specific needs, 1853. 
prescription — Sermons for certain con- 
ditions, 2319. 

Medication for sickness — Spiritual better- 
ment, 1625. 

Medicinal roots undiscovered — Bible treas- 
ures unfound, 1861. 

Medicine — Paper money in war and peace, 
1005. 
in action — Conflict leading to peace, 

2373- 
not food — Sorrow not typically Chris- 
tian, 252. 
of sorrow — Bible coeval with man's 

need, 1883. 
orthodoxy and heterodoxy in — Religious 
differences, 2224. 
Medieval castles — Antiquated religious 

thought-forms, 2197. 
Melodies and harmony — Worldly and 

Christian joy, 503. 
Memories — Imagination stronger than 

reason, 2326. 
Men four feet high — Standards of self- 
judgment, 359. 
Mephitlc gas — Discouragement, 1730. 

bubbles — Poems of sensual school, 2452. 
Merchant prince — Faith deals with the 
invisible, 2010, 



Merchant, selfish endurance of — Not meek- 
ness, 1752. 
study of human nature by — By min- 
ister, 2283. 

Mercury's winged sandals — The peaceful 
spirit, 813. 

Messenger, God's — Imagination, 379. 

Metallurgist knows ore — Spiritual discern- 
ment of Bil)le, 1851. 

Meteor — Transitoriness of thought, 380. 

Miasm and quinine — Fear and hope, 
1997. 

Miasma from stagnation — Property not 
circulated, 596. 

Michael Angelo, art of — Teachers and 
preachers nobler than artists, 2414. 
result of generations — God's kingdom 

long result of time, 2509. 
scaffolding of — Disclosures of future, 

335- 
works of — Genius needs industry, 507. 
Midges and butterflies — Vanity, 760. 
Mignonette — Goodness made apparent, 

1521. 
Milan cathedral, observers of — Varying 

conceptions of God, 1123. 
Militia and regular army — Generosity and 

benevolence, 2386. 
Military band — Soul qualities dispropor- 
tionate, 1684. 
divisions of same army not jealous — 
Unity should be harmony, 2263. 
Milk°pan, full, slops both ways — Mirth and 

pathos, 2303. 
Mill Ijrook — Working piety, 1506. 

grinding flour at, instead of at home — 

Organized charity, 2403. 
not flour — Devotion not piety, 1464. 
streams — Power of feeling, 408. 

and cascade — Motion and emotion, 
410. 
without grist — Empty meditation, 386. 
Miller, Hugh, quarryman and philosopher 
— Great-mindedness in humble call- 
ings, 511. 
Milton and mathematics — Belief with the 
heart, 403. 
daughter of, reading Greek — Seeing 
nature superficially, 2550. 
Mind in body — Immanence of God, 

1 1 29. 
Mine, finding a — Religion a life-work, 
1484. 
shaft-sinking — God's severe dealings, 

677. 
untler the fort — Unnoted indulgences, 
1360. 
wall — Unseen faults, 721. 
water pumped out — Giving with grudg- 
ing, 2390. 



620 



INDEX OF ILLUSTHATIONS 



Ministering to a low or a charming child 
— liencvolcncc or personal love, 
2392. 
iVlint, coining molten truth — Ihe true 
preacher, 2271. 
God's — Adversity, 623. 
in rhiladelphia— Mere money-makers, 
606. 
Minting men like dollars— Enforcing uni- 
form beliefs, 1973. 
of gold ore — Death an advancement, 

Mirror, concave — Distorted views of God, 
1119. 
retlecting light — Religion, receiving and 

giving, 1463. 
scratches behind — Sullying of con- 
science, 1348. 
shattered — Imperfect preaching of Christ 
reflects truth, 12S3. 
Miser raising flag on Independence Day — 

Insincere rejoicings, 21 17. 
Mission-sctiool children — God loves as 

men need, 1215. 
Mist before the sun — Superstition dis- 
pelled by righteousness, 2559. 
blown away — New ideals given by 

Christ, 1048. 
poor medium for observatory — Clouded 
vision, 1055. 
Mob attacking wrong house — Living be- 
yond malice, 660. 
Mole's view of hyacinth — Earth-view of 

moral truth, 464. 
Momentum of ship — Conduct needs con- 
tinuance, 1337. 
Monarclis, the best, not worst, as ideals — 

God's kingsliip, 1179. 
Money, counting of — Moral training im- 
perfect, 449. 
for wortliy cause — Prompt action on 

noble impulses, 1554. 
from one pocket to another — Proselyting 

among sects, 2173. 
maker, description of — Money-worship, 
608. 
Mont Blanc — Man's higher nature unfruit- 
ful, 1656. 
Moody and Sankey — Holy Spirit works 
through men, 1313. 
D. L., and Dr. C. G. Finney — Prac- 
tical and theological preaching, 2305. 
Moon beautiful but futile for harvests — 

Preaching without eternal life, 2357. 
Moonlight for agriculture — Estlietic re- 
ligion, 1449. 
Morass of evil influence — Parable of Eden 
in old theology, 2209. 
sub-drained — Reclamation of evil traits, 
723- 



Morbid anatomy — Condemnation not refor- 
mation, 2375. 
Morning-glory twining on shadow — Loving 
an unknowable God, 1 1 14. 
star — Satan tempting Jesus, 1231. 
Mortmain — Danger of creeds and con- 
fessions, 2186. 
Mosaic institutions mostly gone — Vitality 
of Sabbath, 2040. 
of Raphael's Ascension — Significance of 
the insignificant, 2500. 
Moses and God's goodness — God's glory, 
1 176. 
could not have believed a vision of 
America — Coming day not now re- 
alized, 2506. 
died without the sight — Victory from 

predecessor's defeats, 534. 
in laws and institutes — Indirect in- 
fluence, 2439. 
on Nebo — Hope of heaven in age, 282. 

— Solitariness of death, 304. 
original nature of — Inspiration not crea- 
tion, 1306. 
provided music and dancing — Joy a part 

of religion, 487. 
with David, as Paul with John — Great 
religious geniuses, 1939. 
Mosquitoes — Malicious gossip, 785. 

— Nimbleness of proverbs, 2444. 
Mosses, cryptogamous — Intents of the 

heart, 1076. 
Moth — Insidious sins, 1359. 

in garment — Petty sins destroy char- 
acter, 715. 
Mother and babe — God's beneficence, 
1131. 
family law — Sin against divine 

parent, 1430. 
sick cliild — Joy of sacrifice, 7. 
suckling — God's grace, 1 152. 
at party — Trained perceptions, 366. 
child, wife, love of — Immortality, 315. 
heart — God's children not forgotten, 

1 108. 
language — Education begins in sim- 
plicity, 2417. 
love and theory — Theologizing only 

philosophizing, 2195. 
of all graces — Christian good-will, 1687. 
relic of — Early environment, 844. 
serving chdd — Christian kindness spon- 
taneous, 1 78 1, 
soothing frightened child — The com- 
forting God, 1 135. 
soul — God's love to his world, 4. 
teaching child — Revelation, unveiling 

things not known, 1887. 
with hurt child — God's nearness in 
trouble, 1552. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



621 



Mother, young, and grandmother — God's 

knowledge of all experience, 2020. 
Motherhood — The atonement, 1289. 

ideal — Preferring one another, 1783. 
Mothering tired children — God's bosom, 

1 201. 
Mother's breast — Nature better than books 
about it, 2548. 
doing for child — Phases of Christian 
love, 1683. 
Motion earth's revolution and orbital — In- 
dividual and race-progress, 2458. 
Motive power harnessed — Secondary state 

of feeling, 442. 
Moulds A rule, 952. 

Mountain, descent of — Resolution and per- 
formance, 846. 
echo — God's sympathy, 1 173. 
ice-clad summit — Selfish aspiration, 

851. 
lofty — Quiet power of meekness, 1753. 
peaks in sunset — Benefits remembered, 

1093. 
stream — Irregularity of Elijah, 1906. 
and meadow-brook — Romans VII 
and VIII, 1940. 
verdure-clad ; Mont Blanc — God as 
father; as ruler, 2248. 
Mountaineering — Achievement demands 

more achievement, 478. 
Mountains and clouds — Spiritual refresh- 
ment, 1679. 
Mount Holyoke, top of — Eseape from life's 
storms, 1755. 
of vision towards promised land of spirit 

— Sermon on mount, 1932. 
Pleasant thunder-storm — Mystery of life 

cleared, 2037. 
Washington, railroad to top of — Uplift- 
ing power of singing, 2064. 

view from — Vision of faith, 2013. 
Mourner, his own at death — Selfish man 
solitary, 2383. 
seeks lost beyond earth — Bereavement, 
expansion, 270. 
Muck-ralte — Wealth no title to remem- 
brance, 617. 
Mud, fertihzing, of floods — Immigration, 

995- 
on white clotliing — Religious intoler- 
ance conspicuous, 2148. 

Mulberry-tree — Growth and diffusion of 
feeling, 1613. 

Mule for men's evil errands — Conscience, 
1346. 

Muliein-stalli — Virtue not negative, 1031. 
last year's — Man retiring from business, 
586. 

Multiplication-table — Prayers without 
thought — 1S03. 



Mummies — Poor contentment, 419. 
— Sins repented of, 1567. 
— Worn-out creeds, 2207. 
Muscle, iron and human — Machinery frees 
lalDor, 532. 
to be used — Moral activity for vitality, 
1606. 
Mushroom and timber — Weak morality 
worthless, IO40. 

tree — Good growth, slow growth, 
1616. 
Music, art of — Widening horizons of life, 
1669. 
box key — Simple truths may begin 

great effects, 2269. 
distant — Visions of the invisible, 321. 
faint, far — Intimations of heavenly joys, 

322. 
heard not seen — God spiritually appre- 
hended, 1 153. 
in melody, harmony, symphony — Beauty 

of moral character, 1735. 
rests in — Solitude after society, 841. 
science of — Moral excellence means 

labor, 1649. 
strange and irregular — The Apocalypse, 

1951- 
Musical genius discerns faint discord — 
Moral intuitions, 454. 
instinct needed for music — God known 

through man's best qualities, 1154. 
instrument, quality of — Power of enjoy- 
ment, 613. 
melody and harmony — Complexity of 

life, 382. 
notes to melodious ideas — Words to 

thought, 2299. 
parts concordant — True lovers, 10 1, 
score called oft' by letters — Cold-hearted 

preaching, 2273. 
theme elaborated — Spirit races beyond 
men, 86. 

changed by organ-stops — Intellect 
colored by emotion, 361. 
Musician hates discord — A sensitive con- 
science, 1333. 
Musk in a chest — Persistent power of 

Calvinism, 2200. 
Musket, old-fashioned kicking — Foreign 
missions best effect at home, 2093. 

Naaman — Not chosen because not choos- 
ing, 1560. 
Naming, men's and God's — The rich fool, 

615. 
Naomi; Mara — Significance of ancient 

names, 1898. 
Napoleon — Labors of genius, 508. 

— Sleep not to be gauged by others* 
needs, 205. 



622 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Napoleon and his marshals — Man's ig- 
norance ; God's providence, 2033. 
marshal of, and the bomb — Steadfastness 

of faith, 2018. 
music of, crossing Alps — Power from 
inspiration, 2016. 
Nashville University— Wise giving, 2401. 
Natural bent to be heeded — Poet from 
practical parents, 50. 
birth — Mother to lead child in new 

birth, 150. 
law, learning of — Individual interpre- 
tation of Bible, 1850. 
spiritual and, beauties — Christ-life in 
men, 1279. 
Navigating through Hell-gate (East River) 
— Perplexities of parentage, 143. 
— Alcoholic drinking, 1374. 
Navigation-chart — Bible a guide to right 

living, 1869. 
Neatness in bedroom and in stone-mason's 

shop — Truth varies, 810. 
Nebuchadnezzar — Human and divine mo- 
rality, 1156. 
Needle threaded with selfishness — Flatterer, 

773- 
Needles in bunch, blunt ; single, sharp — 

Individual preaching, 2335. 
Needy or attractive children sought — Be- 
nevolence or aflinity, 2391. 
Neglect of fire-alarm — Indirect guilt, 730. 
Nerve destroyed — Reprobation possible, 

1423. 
plexuses of nation — Cities, 1012. 
sensibility — Pain by Divine intention, 

213. 
Nest, a safe — A goodly parentage, 131. 
New England — Early hardship good for- 
tune, 655. 
New sprout from old stock — Sermon on 

Mount not original, 1929. 
New York and Paris — Morals at home and 

abroad, 847. 
Newsboys and voices — Vocal power to be 

trained for, 2295. 
Niagara, crossing on cable — Difficulty of 

living right, 540. 
irresistible power of — Religion of fate, 

2206. 
falls unappreciated — Indifference to 

God, 1087. 
not the model — Poor singing in church 

to be modest, 2062. 
Nlcodemus and Peter — Higher and lower 

courage, 1249. 
Night, coolness of — Jesus' love of solitude, 

1236. 
Nightingale of Psalms — Thirty-third Psalm, 

1909. 
Noah's raven — Grumbling, 756. 



Noble Hungarian refugees — Conscious son- 
ship, 1538. 

Noon growing from morning — Death an 
advance, 31 1. 

Nourishment and cordial for helpless — 
Mercy, divine attribute, iioi. 

Nurse for nervousness, calmness — Peace 
begets peace, 818. 

Oak and harp — Happiness from within, 

490. 
developing — Immature yet true spirit- 
uality, 1619. 
for the centuries — Long growth of the 

world, 2507. 
Oars with wind and tide — Free agency 

and God, 2203. 
Obstinate parent — The divine Father, not 

avenger, 1 178. 
Ocean, summer bath in — Refreshment in 

thought of eternity, 294. 
storm or calm of, under law — Regulation 

of popular unrest, 2536. 
the, a cup — God's great heart, 

1 198. 
October — Beautiful old age, 284. 
Odorous handicrafts, smell of — Professional 

piety, 1527. 
Odors or stenches — Character and reputa- 
tion, 896. 
Ohio river overflow — Modern religious 

influence, 2177. 
Oil lubricating — Humor, 482. 

on machinery — Habit of generosity, 

2410. 
Old family estate — Associations of the 

Bible, 1872. 
Old Testament — Education of Jesus, 

1228. 

bards — Poesy immortal, 2451. 
Opal colors — Look of Jesus, 1234. 

painting portrait of^ — Nature of Christ, 

1222. 
Operative in factory — Liberty, obedience 

to law, 78. 
Ophthalmia cured by putting eyes out — 

Poor remedy for scepticism, 1975. 
Optical treatise in nursery— Modern account 

of creation in Genesis, 1S91. 
Orange=tree — Duty of sweet influence, 

857. 
Orator in speechless baby — Mother's pro- 
phetic love, 6. 
Oratorical inspiration, the first — Real 

j)enitence a sure possession, 1640. 
Orchard — A book, 2436. 
Orchestra — Varied elements of prayer, 

1S06. 
in Bedlam, and concordant — Present 

and future, 2507. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



623 



Orchestral tuning and performance — 
God's will on earth and in heaven, 
1189. 
Ore and forged implements — Divine truth, 
human statements, 2184. 
undug — Mind not educated, 2425. 
Organ building an — Chaotic incomplete- 
ness of man, 2486. 
cathedral — Complexity of man's nature, 

381. 
music in cathedral twilight — Evanes- 
cence of religious inspiration, 1 104. 
pipes and key-board — Conscience and 

reason, 1342. 
playing — Complexity of living, 1689. 

— Oratory, 2288. 
range of, stops — Preaching to include 

all human nature, 2310. 
stops modify musical theme — Intellect 

colored by emotion, 361. 
with distant electric keyboard — Earth- 
connection with heaven, 1434. 
Organized institutions — Permanent be- 
nevolence, 2400. 
Oriental cities — Bible buried under rub- 
bish, 1953. 
dress in Occident — Changing value of 
creeds, 2198. 
Orplian asylum — Man's need Christ's mo- 
tive, 1280. 
Our countrymen abroad — A personal right 

to God, 1 136. 
Overcoats — Grades of desirability in re- 
vivals, 2129. 
Owls and bats doubting sun — Philosophers 

scorning invisible Christ, 127 1. 
Ox, the, in Mosaic law — Saloon-keepers to 

be responsible, 2365. 
Oysters and sponges— Seclusion not re- 
ligion, 548. 

Package of deeds including wrong paper — 
Biblical errors thrown out without in- 
jury, 1964. 

Painter, German, in Italy — New ideals, 
1050. 
the village — Low ideals, 1670. 

Painters, older, and later, Italian and 
German — Sincerity, 822. 

Painting, by author's mother — Nature re- 
vealing God, 2565. 
early schools of — Moral quality of hero- 
ism, 462. 
one's own portrait — Self-revelation, 401. 

Palette and painting — Beneficence of ad- 
versity, 638. 

Panic in crowd — Dissensions of humanity, 

2473- 
Parental blessing—" Without me, nothing," 
1 168. 



Parents not to depend on children — Fru- 
gality and manliness, 828. 
with children — Jesus simple and mys- 
tical, 1238. 
Paris and New York — Morals abroad and 

at home, 847. 
Parthenon restored vision of — God seen as 
he is, 1 159. 

— Ruin of men under city tempta- 
tion, 2472. 
Partnership with God— Business methods 

for better morals, 557. 
Patriarchs of the pool — Croakers, 757, 
Patriotic soldiers in battle — Christian unity 

in reform work, 2361. 
Pattern woven in God's loom — Present 

sorrow future joy, 225, 
Paul and early orthodoxy — Apostolic 
heresy, 2190. 

Greek culture — True religion of 
heart not head, 1743. 
cloud of witnesses of — Companionship 

in labor, 533. 
dying voice of — Epistle to Philippians, 

1946. 
gcntlemanliness of — Religion demands 

courtesy, 1495. 
living in others — Great minds stim- 
ulative, 2438. 
love of, for Christ — Enthusiasm of love, 

1789. 
to John as Moses to David — Great re- 
ligious geniuses, 1939. 
Pauper and prince — Inward and outward 

riches, 695. 
Payson on death-bed — Life increases 

vision, 1694. 
Pea-brush for pea-vines — Simple customs 

for simple lives, 850. 
Peace after war — Ruth after Judges, 

1900. 
Peacemakers children of God — Peace se- 
renity in activity, 1102. 
Peach and partridge-berry — Fruits of spirit 
various, 1321. 
eating a — God's personality known by 

love, not analysis, 1141. 
enjoying a — Self-deception in Christian 
hope unlikely, 1601. 
Pearl, a— The Story of Ruth, 1899. 
among days — The Sabbath, 2040. 
from rough oyster — Rahab from har- 
lotry, 1948. 
Pearls cast into jewel-case — Parables of 
Jesus, 1927. 

— Good deeds, 15 16. 
to be dived for — Hidden thought the 
best, 384. 
Pedestal or pillory — Honor or shame in 
wealth, 592. 



624 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Peerage — Tlic Order of Kailh, in Hebrews, 

202 1. 
Pen— Contrasted with tongue, 943. 
Pendulum — Between sorrow and gladness, 
255. 
— Church vibrates between law 

and gospel, 2245. 
— Condemnation and hope recon- 
ciled, 1 3 10. 
— Lack of spiritual persistence, 
1760. 
Perfume of Magdalen's vase — Value of 
sentiment, 1068. 

vines — Jesus detached from his en- 
vironment, 1237. 
Personal etjuation in moral judgment — 

Astronomer, 453. 
Phidias — Ciood work in unseen places, 524. 
the Zeus of — Imagination and belief, 
1976. 
Philosopher's stone — Endurance trans- 
muting lower to higher, 258. 
Photograpiiic plate — Knowledge of God 
not mere impression, 1060. 

— Susceptibility to the Divine, 
2002. 
Photographs, spiritual — Individual con- 

ce]5tions of Christ, 1295. 
Photography — Social influence, 834. 
Physical deficiencies of children — Moral 
feebleness, 17. 
ills doctored — Soul-sickness ignored, 

1439- 
Physician giving bodily regimen — Bible 
interpreting laws of life, 1862. 
neglecting special diseases — Pulpit ig- 
noring reforms, 2357. 
rough treatment by — Reformers not 

respecting prejudices, 2376. 
skilled, acceptable — Christ the sure 

leader, 1262. 
treats cause of illness — Radicalism of 
Christ, 1242. 
Piano playing — Taking up cross in Chris- 
tian life, 145 1, 
tuning — Regulation by adversity, 649. 
wailing of tuned — Mourning under 
trouble, 632. 
Pick-axe and gold — Education does not 

originate, 2433. 
Picket and general — Ideal perfection and 

present duty, 17 16. 
Picture gallery — An average congregation, 

2334. 

a matchless — Eleventh chapter of He- 
brews, 2459. 

hung in air — Continuing power of Christ, 
1258. 

of a home — Domestic life test of char- 
acter, 162. 



Picture, subject of a great — Impersonality 

of Jesus, 1237. 
Pictures seen not heard — God spiritually 

apprehended, 1153. 
Pigments for portrait — Christ of history, 

art, and philosojihy, 1221. 
Pile-drivers — Energetic natures, 542. 
Pilgrims unsettled — Life a march, 549. 
Pillar of fire — Sabbath luminous leader of 

civilization, 2049. 
Pillars of right and wrong — God's govern- 
ment, 1 1 33. 
Pilot — Salvation through Christ, 1275. 
Pins and plans — Ruthless speculators worse 

than law-breakers, 573. 
Pirate — Manufacturing deceit, loii. 
Pitch, keyed to a high — Loftiness of 

Sermon on Mount, 1928. 
Pitched to key of common life — Bible an 

everyday book, 1846. 
Plague hospital — Moral corruption, 53. 
stricken district — Goodness not to shun 
world, 544. 
Plant, a living — A good name, 901. 

earth and air — Reforms complained of 

by evil-doers, 2363. 
evolution gradual — God's patience with 

man, 2484. 
germination — Early development slow, 

2471. 
growth, stages of — Spiritual growth 
gradual, 161 8. 
Planting and transplanting — Spiritual de- 
velopment takes time, 1708. 
rough ground with beauty — Pleasure in 
homely toil, 529. 
Plants and autumn frosts — Courage under 
failure, 679. 
broad- leaved — Lower life enriched by 

higher, 1695. 
dependent on climate — Moral life needs 

love, 1069. 
hot-house, taken outdoors — Death a 

transplanting, 312. 
in open air — Churches need excitement, 
2124. 
Plate not food — Lower life unsatisfying, 

1699. 
Plates in sets — Varying kinds of Chris- 
tians, 2096. 
Plato — Admiration not love of, 1224. 
Plow crushing field life — New thought 
wasteful, 2240. 
in the field — Trouble comes to enrich, 

229. 
leveling old corn-ridges — Democracy of 

public schools, 2422. 
needed for wheat — Worth of the church, 

2175- 
not harvest — Creeds not religion, 1508. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



625 



Plowed soil releases malaria — Moral sensi- 
bility discovers sin, 1652. 
Plowing an old field — Eras of doubt, 1972. 
for new crops — Russian despotism re- 
constructed, 2517. 
of furrows for good seed — Financial dis- 
turbances, 2332. 
same field — Spiritual culture grows 

easier, 1673. 
surface — Feeling in shallow natures, 
415. 
Plows, ancient and modern — Past not to 

rule present, 2528. 
Plus and minus — Good and bad scepticism, 

1982. 
Plymouth Church, Brooklyn — Congre- 
gationalism, 2158. 
Pocket-World — The newspaper, 2453. 
Poem — Garden-parable of Eden, 2209. 
Poet a genius in beautiful ideas — Preacher 
in moral ideas, 2274. 
finds poetry in world — Saviour personal 

to each, 1264. 
the — Self-measurement upwards, 2440. 
Poetic speaker — Ground of forgiveness in 

God's nature, 1205. 
Poison — Pure fear, 1993. 

small doses of — Accustomed to evil, 

1419. 
stimulus of — Anxiety morbidly desired, 
1994. 
Polar expeditions, etc. — Business men's 
virtues, 588. 
star to slave — Jesus the guide, 1267. 
escaped southern captive — Heav- 
enly guidance, 1328. 
Pole stirs mud — Aggressiveness arouses 

evil, 754. 
Police-court of to-day — Old Testament 

laws, 1893. 
Politician selfish endurance of — Not meek- 
ness, 1752. 
study of human nature by — By min- 
ister, 2283. 
Politics — Trials of strenuous life, 845. 
Pomology and destruction — Non-fulfillment 

not violation of law, 1636. 
Poor man and rich helper — Faith without 
knowledge, 2009. 
man's garret, fields, or church — Rest of 
Sabbath worship, 2044. 
Poorhouse — Vicarious penalty, 915. 
Populace and Jesus — Shallow discipleship, 

1654. 
Popular elevation ; class-privilege — Value 

and peril of priesthood, 2 171. 
Porcelain decoration — Beautifying of char- 
acter, 73. 
in biscuit — Childhood time for im- 
pressions, 30. 



Portrait almost like original — Morality in- 
complete, 1025. 
of angel— Self-recognition, 433. 
painting — Human imperfection, 1637. 
without head— Morality without spirit- 
uality, 1025. 
Portraits, partial — Fragmentary reading 

of Gospels, 1225. 
Post-office, sorting letters in — Law in 

world's tumult, 2535. 
Potato vines in cellar — Longing for God, 

1088. 
Potatoes, first use of — Ignorance of Bible 

promises, 1854. 
Pots here, freely in other life — Human 

growth, 2492. 
Potsherds behind pottery — Public life ruin- 
ing young men, 991. 
Potter and clay — God interrogated by 

intelligence, 11 26. 
Poultice on bruise — Sympathy of heart, 

880. 
Powder — Jewish fanatical patriotism, 2512. 
— Latent sin, 1399. 
— The tongue, 783. 
— Wealth, 594. 
Prairie and seeds — Indolent man ready for 
temptation, 1377. 
lost and found on the — God's rejoic- 
ing over rescued souls, 1158. 
Prairie-fire — Irregular habits and im- 
morality, 59. 

— Resist beginnings, 58. 
Preacher — Baby teaching lessons, 3. 

— Condition of faculties for work, 
388. 
Precious stones, beauty of — The Beati- 
tudes, 1931. 
Precipice— Yes, 1376. 
Premium on character — Commercial credit, 

900. 
Presbytery and responsibility — Church 

councils and authorities, 2157. 
Priestess, a natural — Woman to pray in 

prayer-meeting, 2122. 
Printer's unimportant error on chart — 

Biblical inaccuracies, 1888. 
Prison, man in — Unbeliever in immor- 
tality, 320. 
release from — Bad habits broken, 

1432- 
Problem requires all its figures — Faculties 

all needed, 450. 
Prodigal, return of — Recognized fatherly 

love, 149. 
son — Prayer of the wicked, 1824. 
Prodigality in abundance — Wealth in 

poverty, 642. 
Profanity before minister — Confessed 

Christianity a safeguard, 2089. 



626 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Profession, a, gained by cilucatiou — l.ifc, 
927. 
cnterinf; a — Conversion a study of 
Cliiistian living, 157S. 

Promontories and tide — Temptation to be 
lied before it comes, 1364. 

Property not vital — A " ruined " man, 702. 

Proverbs and f^hilosophy — Compliments 
and praise, 947. 
ubiquity of — The power of good phras- 
ing. 2443- 

Pruaiag, awaiting result of — Patience in 
obedience, 1621. 
knife — Sorrow, 237. 

methods of — Disagreement without 
quarrel, 926. 

Psalms — Praise lightens trouble, 242. 

Public assemblies — Humor friend of con- 
science, 1336. 

Puddle and flowing stream — Duty of 
activity, 536. 

Puff-ball and prince — Character test of 
success, 622. 

Pump from bad well — Society to control 
private conduct, 921. 
or spring — Giving stingily or freely, 
2385. 

Puppet made perfect — Man to grow per- 
fect, 76. 

Puritan Protestantism — Principles of, 
2156. 

Purple or drab — Quality interior not ex- 
terior, 603. 

Pyramid — Effect of Lincoln's death on 
government, 982, 

— Spiritual nature of the unspiritual, 
1016. 

Quagmire warning — Trouble as a guide, 

663. 
Quaker and fiery abolitionist — Speaking 

truth in love, 925. 
Quakers — Meek possessing the earth, 

1507. 
Quarreling children — Conversion not to be 

reluctant, 1572. 
Quarrying budding material from self — 

Narrow conceit, 2267. 
Quartz-crushers — Energetic natures, 452. 
Quicksilver-ore in smelting-furnace — Prof- 
itable losses, 707. 
Quinine, discove:-y of — Nature's wealth to 

be found out, 2562. 

Rabbis and Jesus — Scholastic prejudice 

rejecting truth, 2433. 
Rags and nakedness — Morality better than 

nothing, 1028. 
Railway car the vehicle, not the person — 

Death is of the body, 309. 



Railway oi)eration — Necessary labors on 
Sunday, 2047. 

switch — ("ritical decisions, 1469. 

wreck — Orthodoxy and Unitarian Sun- 
day-schools, 2147. 
Raiment growing shabby — Moral deterio- 
ration, 722. 

no moral distinction — Goodness and 
badness interior, 15 12. 
Rain and rainbow — Discomfort glorified, 
666. 

clouds to make crops — The preacher a 
talker, 2289. 

cold, late, checking vegetation — Sorrow 
paralyzing the soul, 248. 

early, stimulates vegetation — Wedded 
love changes emotion to action, 127. 

efficiency of — Power of the weak, 520. 

turned to ice — Tearless grief, 224. 

vegetation — Unforeseen effects, 

1327- 

versus storm — Simple pleasure best, 498. 
Rainbow and storm-cloud — Love and 

hatred, 1780. 
Ramparts around city — Public law, 1203. 
Raphael, a, demonstrable only to art lover 

— Agnosticism natural, 11 12. 
children of — Youth ashamed of saintly 

parents, 63. 

— Indirect influence, 2439. 
school of — School of Christ, 1722. 
Transfiguration of, copying — True self- 
examination, 1665. 
Rash upon the skin — Sacred heats of 

Pharisees, 758. 
Rasps that wear off the skin — Harm of 

profanity, 946. 
Rat-hole stopped — Perseverance in self- 
cleansing, 1 54 1. 
Raw material unmanufactured — Untrained 

church members, 2105. 
Razor without a handle — Brain-power 

without health, 195. 
Realm, invisible, of joy — Persecuted for 

righteousness, 659. 
Reaping and sowing — Reputation and 

character, 897. 
Reason, historical development of human 

— Ages to come, 345. 
Rebekah and Isaac — Counterparts in mar- 
riage, 116. 
Reckless son asking money for debt — 

Prayer under pressure, 1819. 
Recruit in army — Enduring hardness, 692. 
Reeling in by the line of love — Tenacity of 

home-influence, 692. 
Religious phraseology — Strong talk for 

strong feeling, 1498. 
Remedy and patient — Discrimination in 

preaching, 2329. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



627 



Remorse in morals— Illness punishment 
for violated physical law, 216. 

Reports, reckless— Heedless judgments, 
779- 

Reservoir become frog-pond — Money un- 
used, 595. 
for Erie canal — Conscience as sense 
of duty, 1343. 

Rest — American public amusements, 999. 

Revivals of relij^ion — 1-ife inspires life, 
S91. 

Reynolds, Sir Joshua — Eternity the back- 
{jround of life, 314. 

Rhododendrons— Growth solidified, 1702. 

Richest man in New York — Writer of 
great hymns, 2069. 

Rifle and game — Institutions valued for 
their effect, 2170. 

Ripples — Feeling in shallow natures, 415. 

River and canal — High and low civi- 
lization, 987. 
boom — P'orce of example, 866. 
broadening of a — Teachings of Jesus, 

1239. 
drops of — Multiplicity of thoughts, 391. 
rill, and — Beginnings of character, 

899. 

floods, houses wrecked in — Life on too 
low a plane, 685. 

increasing to sea — Christian life, 1713. 

industrial, full to ocean — Work in age, 
278. 

of death bridged by successive bereave- 
ments — Engineers, 306. 
life — Wedded love, 109. 

wears boulders smooth — Social polish, 

831. 

Rivet inseparable — Love God AND neigh- 
bor, 1468. 

Road easiest, to heavenly gate — Liturgical 
or extempore prayer, 181 2. 
worn hard — Phrases of consolation, 
247. 

Robber baron — Manufacturing deceit, 

lOII. 

Robin on eggs — Revivals of religion 

awaken life, 1551. 
Rock and crystal — Body and soul, 652. 

wax ; sun and frost — Prosperity and 
adversity, 627. 
gushing water in wilderness — Spon- 
taneity of prophets, 1907. 
Rocks, written on the — Divine law of 

betterment, 2532. 
Rockets — Brilliant sermons, 2292. 
Rocky Mountains, crossing westward — 
Democracy raises average of man- 
kind, 2526. 
Roll of niimortals — Lincoln's name on, 

9^Z- 



Roman Catholic Sisters of Mercy — Chris- 
tianity judged by its fruits, 1734. 
Roman idea of the State — Danger of labor- 
unions, 930. 
Rome gone but war remains — Slow growth 

of Christ's peace, 2463. 
Roof, glass or slate — Soul open to divine 

influence, 1301. 
Rooster — Orator's voice, 2298. 
Root of David in true soil — Jesus in rock 
sepulcher, 1253. 

the tree — Spiritual truth always the 
pulpit theme, 2340. 
stem, blossoms, without fruit — Morality 
partial, 1026. 

and maturation — Three stages of 
world-growth, 254. 
Roots and branches — Man's strength and 
woman's, 92. 

grow deeper — Carelessness danger- 
ous, 728, 
growing, power of — Holy Spirit in man, 

I3I4- 
of literature — High results of com- 
merce, 588. 
seeking moisture — Women at the 
sepulcher, 91. 
Rose — Beauty of holiness, 1505. 

cultivation — Spiritual culture, 1667. 
fragrance — Method of Biblical inspira- 
tion unimportant, 1867. 
one, demands another — Goodness multi- 
plies, 1671. 
withered, for friend — Postponing the 
new life, 1446. 
Roses developed by culture — Responsive- 
ness of children to care, 32. 
feeble and healthy —Moral measure- 
ments individual, 455. 
Rottenness destroying cohesion — Greek 

genius without morality, 2513. 
Route, circuitous, Greece to New York — 

Perils of future probation, 318. 
Rowing up-stream — Obstacles to higher 

life, 1692. 
Rudder — The human will, 1458. 
Rugs to wipe feet on — Children treated 

without respect, 19. 
Rust — Cares of life, 482. 
Ruth, the book of — Sympathetic moods for 

reading, 2450. 
Rye — Virtues of slow growth, 48. 

Sabbath difference between Hebrew and 
Puritan — Joy sanctified, 499. 

Sacrifice for friend — Learning God's na- 
ture, 1790. 
self, of mothers, ministers, etc. — Religion 
jierennial, 1453. 

Safe-lock — Self-consciousness, 763. 



(uS 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Safety-valves —I'.inupcan public amuse- 

lucnts, 999. 
Sahara — Indifterence, 1970. 

ill soul — Relincmcnt not to be ex- 
clusive, loSi. 
Sails not all, but hull and freight also — 
Society moves by average mass, 2493. 
anchors — Good works, 1626. 
spread to help current — Man moving 
with the ages, 2542. 
Saint in golden niche — Wealth with good- 
ness, 597. 
St. Peter's dome — Close of Romans VIII, 
1942. 
ascent of — Perseverance to the end, 
1761. 
Salt air east of Alleghanies — Tonic in- 
fluence of woman, 90. 
Same name, meal-hours, etc., in a town — 

Church unity valueless, 2081. 
Sand, house on, good in fair weather — 
Trials test strength, 624. 
Sahara of gold — Unsuccessful success, 
612. 
Sap rising in Spring — Popular intelligence, 

2502. 
Savonarola — Power of weakness allied 

with God, 2356. 
Scales of chemist — Christ's divinity meas- 
ured by love not texts, 1281. 
turning of — Critical decisions, 1469. 
Scars, maiming, etc. — Physical retribution, 

188. 
Scavenger and sewer — Tongue and ear, 

792. 
School among colliers — Christian life be- 
gins slowly, 1597. 
going home from — Death, vacation 

time, 310. 
house not dwelling — The world not our 

home, 336. 
of life — Marriage permanent, according 

to Jesus, 123. 
to university — Death a grade, 288. 
saloon disallowed near — Sunday saloon- 
closing 2046. 
Schoolmaster — Churchly forms valuable 
according to effect, 2169. 

— The Divine patience, 1195. 
Science and husbandman — Holy Spirit and 
the Church, 13 12. 
modern, in Temple at Jerusalem — 

A]50stolic arguments now, 2279. 
the opener — Primitive revelation, 2229. 
Scion from desirable tree — Starting aright 

in Christian life, 1591. 
Scorner at conversions — The soul in 

danger, 2125. 
Scott's " Lady of the Lake " — The peace- 
ful spirit, 813. 



Scribes and Pharisees -Religion without 

sympathy is sin, 2095. 
Scrubbing for neatness — Disturbances of 

rclorm, 2372. 
Sculpin — Empty greed, 575. 
Sculptor, chisel of — Self-portraiture by 
motive, 432. 
clay of — The future, 1568. 

work of — Divine fashioning of 
man's glory, 1723. 
great, for making image of man — Sur- 
passed by man himself, 72. 
with marble — God's dealing with men, 
1643. 
Sculpture — Suffering, God's shaping of 

manhood, 647. 
Sea, bathing in shore-waters of — Thoughts 
of death, 290. 
breezes over the, of death — Blessedness 

of age, 273. 
captain, a fiddling, and wreck — 

Merrymaker and soul, 1406. 
embarkation on stormy — Youth be- 
ginning manhood, 45. 
motion of, intermittent — Sorrow's vary- 
ing moods, 240. 
murmurs of — Desires of worldly heart, 

1 106. 
of sleep drowns a third of life — Use 

through waste, 205. 
ripples of, on undiscovered shore — 

Motherhood forecastings, 129. 
sand, handful of— Prayer-meeting dis- 
closures not all, 21 18. 
shore, names written on — Fame brief, 

535- 
sickness, and beauty of foreign lands — 
Earth and heaven, 351. 

avoiding— Equanimity to be learned, 
1611. 
voyage, discomforts of — Earthly sorrow 

suggests heavenly joy, 238. 
with mud at bottom — Imperfect He- 
brews to be thanked for Bible, 
1879. 
Seasoning dish while cooking — Child- 
training continuous not spasmodic, 
10. 
Seasons, development of — Growth of love 

with years, 108. 
Seat in street-car — Courtesy better than 
catechism, 889. 
walking-stick unopened — The unedu- 
cated, 2426. 
Secret tn^salUavce — Christ unconfessed, 

1546. 
Secretiveness — Sin, wrong use of right 

faculties, 1386. 
Seducer — Home ruined by evil temper, 
171. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



629 



Seed — Seminal character of Bible, 1966. 
dies to live — Truth crushed to earth, 661. 
growing — Goodness needs Divine nour- 

islnnent. 1690. 
growth almost invariable — Man-growth 

variable, 74. 
in prepared ground — Temptation finds 

welcome, 793. 
of manhood — Childhood of Jesus, 1226. 
planted — Vital force of liberty, 965. 
sowing in mid-ocean — Seemingly un- 
fruitful work, 526. 
thorn-bush — Ugly words, 786. 
Seeds, autumn-sown, spring-blossomed — 

Death and resurrection, 265. 
in different soils — Christian life in 

various conditions, 1634. 
of God — Tears, 159. 
planted seek light — Sorrow bears germs 

of joy, 222. 
sown by wind — Vice easily propagated, 

I377-. 
sprout in darkness — Temptation works 

in secret, 1378. 
tropical, in temperate zone — Human 

life to be developed hereafter, 327. 
wind-sown — Heart-associations of life, 

843- 
watered with tears — Patient labor under 

discouragement, 528. 
See-saw of children — Overcome evil with 

good, 950. 
Self'Sacrifice and selfish lust — Christian 

and pagan conception of deity, 1 256. 
Sentinel awake to evil — Habits of hearing, 

794. 
Sepulcher as a sieve — Body to remain on 

earth, 210. 
Seraph — Love winged by faith and hope, 

1800. 
Serpent : lion — Repudiation more danger- 
ous than war, 1006. 
in soul — Man-hater no God-lover, 1796. 
Serpents — Insidious sins, 1359. 
Serving for gratitude and for pay — Love 

and justice, 2252. 
Severe parents — Self-government not from 

over-government, 2427. 
Sewer and scavenger — Ear and tongue, 

792. 

living in — Rejoicing in iniquity, 791. 
Sex dyed in the wool — Woman's nature, 93. 
Shadow — Reputation, 939. 

of a people — Civil government, 956. 

hawk — Mysterious powers of evil, 

1351- 

on the canvas — Saint Jose])h, 870. 
throwing — Half truths, whole lies, 719. 
worshiping one's — Own good deeds to 
be forgotten, 1785. 



Shadowy realm of feeling, murder in — 

Purpose is crime, 1392. 
Shakespeare and cobbler alike — Divine 
measurements, 1 181. 

living in other poets — Great minds stim- 
ulating, 2438. 

not the exhaustion of — Poetic in- 
spiration, 2546. 

supernaturalism of — Bible symbolism 
not reducible to art-forms, 1902. 

treatment of supersensuous — Lessons 
from miracles, 1917. 

Webster on — Most delightful parts of 
Bible, 1968. 

with history — Jesus with Solomon's 
philosophy, 1925. 
Sharp=shooter, hidden — Death certain and 

uncertain, 289. 
Shearing and weaving — Value measured 

by quality of labor, 2496. 
Sheaves garnered by angels — Sainthood in 

poverty, 693. 
Sheep, lost — Lost souls, 1562. 

stealing from pastures — Mutual respect 
of sects, 2162. 
Shell and color of a dead thing — Super- 
ficial manners, 848. 

burst by the germ — Genius not to be 
suppressed, 373. 
Shepherd for wool — Self-seeking friend- 
ship, 768. 
Shield— No, 1376. 

dimmed by needle pricks — Little faults 
hide God, 714. 
Ship, a beached-Man with health gone, 196. 

anchor-chain of — Religion for time of 
trouble, 1447. 

anchored — Secret sins, 1396. 

and steering-line — Variations from pur- 
pose, 451. 

captain — Faith is trust, 2008. 

chronometer — Bible, man's regulator, 
1868. 

glorying in voyage of — Church partisan- 
ship, 2155. 

leaking seam of — Generosity in a 
money-getter, 576. 

magazine of — Moral danger unheeded, 
1409. 

master, the — Responsibility of neglect, 
729. 

in wreck — Fidelity, 820. 

narrow, wide-spread sails — Sentiment 
without ethics, 1450. 

phosphorescent wake of — Happiness- 
making, 502. 

place for navigation — World place for 
Christianity, 1721. 

unanchored — Soul bestead by doubt, 
1981. 



630 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Ship uiidci headway — Ulcsscdncssuf work, 

552- 
voyage in half-built — Life under difli- 

cullies, -474- 
well built — Durability of character, 469. 
Shooting to learn to shoot — Voting to 

learn to vote, 2424. 
Shot missing its aim — Failures in ser- 
mons, 2323. 
Showers of rain — Transientness of ser- 
mons, 2333. 
Shuttles weaving future garments — 

Events, 2481. 
Sibboleth and Shibboleth — Doctrinal in- 
tolerance, 2 1 89. 
Slclc child refuses medicine — Resisting an- 
swers to prayer, 1828. 
men not yet cured — Church members 
sinful not yet sanctified, 2097. 
Slllc or tow — Quality interior not exterior, 
603. 
spinning to embroider own life — Selfish 

superiority, 1736. 
worm cocoon — Christian activity to con- 
tinue, 1728. 
worms — Fidelity in labor, 1737. 
Silver-ore — Biblical allusions explained 

by facts, 1S43. 
Sinai and Calvary — Tunitive and healing 
love, 140. 
crags of — Early hardship, good fortune, 

655- 
Skating — Skimming, not reading the 

Bible, 1856. 
Skeleton and body — Doctrine and life, 

2181. 
Sketch, outline — Regeneration, 1540. 
Skies tranquil, not brooding storms — 

God's delicacy towards the repentant, 
1202. 
Skin connects with heart — Low things il- 
lustrate loftiest, 2300. 
Sky on morning after storm — Goblet with 

wine of life, 1253. 
Slavery, Hebrew and American — Social 

relationshijjs changed, 853. 
mutual — True friendship, 909. 
Sleep, coming on of — Public life dulls 

moral sense, 992. 
Sleepy in church — People like priest, 

22S5. 
Sluggard wants riches not industry — Re- 
sisting answers to prayer, 1828. 
Small change of treason — Grumbling, 756. 
Smallpox, spreading of — Theory of God's 

creation of unsalvable men, 2213. 
Smart-weed and flower — Gifts measured 

by motives, 887. 
Smiling dead on battlefield — Beautiful 

surrender, 687. 



Smoke ami sermons — Tliii\king in a murk, 

395- 
tamily in — Sulkiness a sin, 742. 
from fireplace — Evil temper at home, 

168. 
of expiring wick — Querulous Christians, 
1502. 
passions, etc., aired out — Putting 
house in order for death, 29. 
Snake, horned — Meanness repulsive, 942. 
Snowflakes and avalanche — Cumulative 

transgressions, 1404. 
Snowstorm — Public opinion, 873. 
Snow with message of life — God's word 

effective, 2561. 
Sociable crowd at end of meeting — Prayer 

gathering to sit close, 21 14. 
Socrates and Hercules — Moral and phy- 
sical courage, 473. 
in Plato — Indirect influence more po- 
tent than direct, 2439. 
Sodom and Gomorrah — Corruption dis- 
likes to be meddled with, 2364. 
Soil, a fat, has weeds — Freedom more 
fertile than restraint, 2346. 
virgin — Disciples of Jesus, 1233, 
Sojourner Truth and Fred'k Douglass — 

Man's strength in God, 2028. 
Soldier recounting petty camp-troubles — 

Care not to be emphasized, 738. 
Soldier's duty — Heroism in trouble, 674. 
Solferino, after battle of — Men ready to be 

helped, 2480, 
Solomon's opinion — Conceit, 397. 

temple, building of — High destiny of 
humble work, 521. 
Song sparrow and eagle — Preacher to be 

himself, not imitation, 2275. 
Son's communion with father — Prayer 

spontaneous, 1816. 
Soot in flues — Sin not hereditary, 139 1. 
Sordidness judging sentiment — Disciples 

and Mary Magdalene, 406. 
Sore muscle — Tender places in hard na- 
tures, 2320. 
Soul's judgment-hall — Uncharitable judg- 
ments, 938. 
Soup and meat — Fiction and fact, 2446. 
Southern gentlemen after Civil War — No- 
bility in adversity, 676. 
Sowing and gathering — No premiums to 
laziness, 504. 

reaping — Cause and effect, 1401. 
Spark, blaze, fire — Enlargement of Chris- 
tian life, 1645. 
extinguished — Act of dying, 297. 
from a flint — " Love at first sight," 114. 
kindling prairie-fire — Power of a true 

preacher, 2287. 
of eternal life — Divine view of man, 2527. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



631 



spark on powder — Power of leiiiptatioii 
in the soul, 1 350. 
or oil — Habits of speaking, 804. 
Sparta — Moral sense, taught and intuitive, 

459- 
Spears in battle — I's used by Paul's 

egoism, 1946. 
Spice and condiments — Works of fiction, 

2447. 
Spider in morning-glory — Evil always 

evil, 1369. 
Spiders in Parthenon cornices — Petty 

errors in Bible, 1965. 
Spider-web — Gambling saloon, 55. 

and cordage — Dangers of smartness, 

570- 

snake — Power of repeated acts, 
1405. 
in window — Repeated faults dim moral 

sight, 713. 
revealed by dew — Unnoticed influence, 

855- 
Spinal marrow and brain — God's love root 

of " advanced " theology, 2246. 
Spirit, not old clothes — Apostolic quality, 
2172. 
of this world — Temptation of Jesus, 

1231. 
world, unhindered social power of — A 
thought of the future, 341. 
Sponge squeezed dry — Business and re- 
ligious feeling, 584. 
Sponges and oysters — Seclusion not re- 
ligion, 547. 
Spring changeableness — Sensitive chil- 
dren, 33. 
coming of, and summer — Triumph of 

meekness, 1779. 
in the forest — Young manhood, 46. 
of water — Loving kindness, 1793. 
— Sense of humor, 485. 
— Soul's self-renewing power, 1078. 
on frozen ground — Love of enemies, 

1772. 
or leaky pump — Giving freely or 

stingily, 2385. 
rock — Delicacy, 409, 
stopping a — Spirit of freedom irre- 
sistible, 966. 
water, cupful of — Prayer-meeting dis- 
closures not all, 21 18. 
Springfield Armory, weapons in — Soul's 

powers of evil, 734. 
Springless and spring-wagon — Doctrines 

old and new, 2227. 
Spur — Fear, 1989. 

for the mule — Preaching must be apt for 
hearer, 2328. 
Staclcing arms for soldier's dinner — Cast- 
ing care on God too temporary, 1830. 



Stairs — Kiunvlcil^e, transient, 1631. 

gcjin^:; up — Elevation means eftbrt, 2489. 
Stalactites and stalagmites — Spiritism and 

spiritual longing, 1084. 
Stalk, leaf, blossom — God's love to man 

prophesies grandeur, 2487. 
Stamp on wax — Christians not made in- 
stantly, 1608. 
Star ; firefly — Man of few talents, 358. 
in firmament — Cheerful traits in religion, 

500. 
making — Origination of noble thought, 

396. 
morning — Silence of great events, 2502. 
obversation by — Hours of vision, 1054. 
of Bethlehem — New light from single 
men, 2355. 

goodness — A mother's memory, 

Starlight — Human side of the atonement, 

1290. 
Stars — God's promises, 2031. 

independent of astronomy — Immuta- 
bility of Bible, 1913. 
State boundaries in Europe and America 

— Consciousness and realization, 1576. 
Statue and packing-case — Man's spirit, 

God's image, 362. 
marred except chin — Human knowledge 

fragmentary, 2194. 
of man and lion — Sects misjudging each 

other, 2149, 
Statues in overwhelmed cities — Wealth 

burying aspiration, 616. 
Stature instantly increased — ^Conversion 

not perfection, 1588. 
Stays at home — Benevolence not enter- 
prising, 2384. 
Stealing an apple — Small transgressions 

damage the soul, 735. 
Steam and engine — Liberty needs means 

of activity, 963. 
Steamers, wet and dry — Surmounting 

trouble, 484. 
Steed, a — Reason, 1990. 

reining in a — Patience in self-control, 

421. 
Steeds, awaiting bit and training — Human 

faculties to be regulated, 430. 
Steel making — Hardship makes strong 

men, 656. 
plate prepared for engraving — Trouble 

softens the heart, 245. 
Steeples without bells — " Great " sermons, 

2286. 
Stellar observation — Short prayers, 1S13. 
Step of heaven light ; tread of earth heavy 

— Happiness of immortality, 329. 
Sticks, many for a fire — Men need men, 

876. 



632 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Stilts, w.ilkiiij^ on^Tliis world aiul llic 
olhor. 1555. 

Stimulating drinks — Preaching to please, 
2291. 

Stock cxcliange — Trained perceptions, 
366. 
gambling — Coveting undue gains, 749. 

Stoic anil Christian ideal manhood — 
Tested by sutlering, S7. 

Stomach as related to head — Furnace to 
machine, 187. 
restored by repentance and diet — Na- 
ture's forgiveness limited, 189. 

Stone, the white — Love-tokens, 353. 

Storehouse — A book, 2436. 

Storm cloud a portent not revelation — Ill- 
ness of friend no time for resignation, 

221. 

ground made of future — Painful fore- 
thought, 2005. 
in summer cleanses — Just anger purities, 

424. 
pelting — Meekness positive patience 

under provocation, 816. 
sweeping the continent — Sorrow for 
I-incoln's death, 246. 
Storms — The passions, 1358. 
Story to explode on striking — Percussion 

bomb, 483. 
Streams from joined drops — Unity to be 
of spirit not thought, 2140. 
obstructed — Reformation manifests evil, 

1427. 
obstruction in — Reforms arouse dis- 
turbance, 2367. 
self-cleansing — Duty of activity, 536. 
to river — Discouragements in early 
Christian life, 1621. 
Street lamp in wind — Disfellowship of 

real Cliristians impossible, 2159. 
Strength increased — Divine lightening of 

burdens, 17 11. 
Struggles of bad men against vice — 

I'rayer universal, 1823. 
Stubble and mud in log-cabin — Humblest 

church members useful, 20S3. 
Studying sixteen hours a day — Infirmity 

not sin, 1384. 
Subsoil plow — Doctrinal preaching to be 

practical, 2182. 
Summer abundance — Soul enriched by 
love, 1524. 
as well as winter — Sacred dignity of re- 
ligion, 1500. 
brook run dry — Disappointment in wed- 
lock, 119. 
day, close of a stormy — A lovely old 

age, 287. 
forces — Formative influences of charac- 
ter inconspicuous, 430. 



Summer fmiii winter — Maiih of humanity 
to selfgovernment, 2.(83. 

in each growing thing — Divine spirit in 
every soul, 1317. 

insects — Uible infested by controversial- 
ists, 1954. 

memories in winter — Evanescence of 
experience, 414. 

storm rages and disappears — Dissolu- 
tion of American armies, 984. 

sun — ^Love in God productive, 1199. 

thunder-shower — Spirit of beneficence, 
I171. 

thunderstorm — Great trouble has 
cleansing power, 267. 

warmth — God known by love, 1 107. 
Sun and ail flowers — Preaching Christ in- 
dividually, 1292. 

blossoms — God's gracious bounty, 

1 190. 
frost — Prosperity and adversity, 627. 
plant — Divine and human coopera- 
tion, 1305. 

bursting through clouds — Rejoicing 
amid sorrow, 266. 

chronometer set by the — Christ the only 
guide, 1 26 1. 

coloring objects — Love spontaneous, 
1794. 

despises nothing — All humanity to re- 
ceive the Gospel, 2485. 

doctor — Outdoor life, 197. 

drawing forth vegetation — Divine love 
for man, 2571. 

evaporating sea — Attraction of God's 
spirit, III. 

father of energies — Symbol of Deity, 
2560. 

flower and its color — Native qualities 
permanent, 450. 

liglit and heat of — Love the atmosphere 
of growth, 1604. 

never weary of giving — God's prom- 
ises, 2031. 

of June or of October — Energy or mild- 
ness of goodness, 434. 

on Sahara and prairie — Revelation re- 
quires receptivity, 1707. 

strawberries — Power of Christ, 
1265. 

rising — Christ our hope, 1218. 

set — The Apocalypse, 1951. 

is sunrise elsewhere — Death be- 
ginning of life, 309. 

setting not rising — Hebrew view of 
death, 302. 

shines on all alike — Variety in preach- 
ing, 2316. 

shining in darkness — Business of church, 
not selfpreservation, 2141. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



633 



Sun, talk of, to flowers— Christ's promise of 
life, 1676. 
to flowers — Holy Spirit to human hearts, 

1297. 
unclouded — Luminous natures, 1049. 
water evaporated by — Attraction of 
God, 2027. 
Sunday (see also Sabbath) in author's boy- 
hood — Should be a day of joy, 25. 
Sunlight and window or cave — .Holy Spirit 
universal but specialized, 1315. 
generosity of — Free grace, 11 89. 
in window — Friend in household, 1274. 
on a plant — God's influence on man's 
development, 1125. 

individual blossom — Holy Spirit 
and man, 1297. 
Sunning one's spirit — Prayer, communion 

with God, 1801. 
Sunrise — The soul finding God, 1533. 
Suns, planets, and satellites — God central 

in human affairs, 1 164. 
Sunshine — Dispositions vary, 807. 

after cloud-shadow — Joy of the new life, 

1600. 
diff^erent effects of — Making use of God, 

1 169. 
in winter and summer — Prayer for 
steady Divine influence, 1759. 
Surf, beat of, on shores of eternity — 
Thoughts about death, 290. 
distant moan of — Sorrow sounds from 
humanity, 209. 
Surgeon amputating leg — Benevolence 
requires force, 2397. 
emotion of, in action — Practical sym- 
pathy, 888. 
not instrument-maker — Minister must 

know human nature, 2282. 
setting broken limb — Kindness of pain, 

653- 

Surgery — Love chastening for cure, 144. 

Swallows and eagles — French and Greeks, 
2514. 

Swearing, habitual, reform of — Credit for 
effort, 466. 

Swim, learning to — The divine training, 
675. 

Swimming Charles River — Forward not 
backward, 686. 
for shore — ^Critical moments for reforma- 
tion, 1414. 
instead of sailing — Spiritual life without 
God, 1460. 

Swiss cottage in Alps— Unwise character- 
building, 631. 

Switch with the leaves on — Involved sen- 
tences in oratory, 2298. 

Sword — No, 1376. 
and wreath — Power of love, 1 146. 



Sword drawn — Wrong use of conscience, 
1333. 
of the Lord, using not forging — Preach- 
ing not theology, 2354. 
of warrior — Money not the man, 621. 
red-hot — Theory of human ruin in 

Adam's fall, 2214. 
short, of every day — Lay preaching, 
864. 
Swords and pruning-hooks — War energies 
used for peace, 25 11. 
of God — The Puritans, 656. 
Sympathy of moods — Spiritual contagion, 

890. 
Symphony, close of a — Old age, 285. 

Tableau, not statement nor history — The 
Apocalypse, 195 1. 

Tan'barit — Time the best seasoner, 1639. 

Tape-measure — Self-consciousness, 763. 

Taper going out — Act of dying, 297, 

Taste, ciuestions of, not debatable — Spirit- 
ual discernment, 1063. 

Tea, first use of — Ignorance of promises in 
Bible, 1854. 

Teacher cares for the dull — Love seeks the 
low, 1770. 
may be wrong, doctrine right — Preach- 
ing and practice, 2308. 

Telescope — The Bible, 1834. 

— Tears, lenses that reveal God, 

235- 
— Tomb to reveal the infinite be- 
yond, 244. 
dimmed by breath — Little faults hide 

God, 714. 
lens, the correct — Seeing God through 

purity, 1 1 24. 
using — Conversion a change of method, 
1561. 
Telescopic power increasing — Growing 

views of God, 2014. 
Temper, hot, irritable — Training changes 

use, not nature, 429. 
Temperate Zone — Golden mean in prop- 
erty, 591. 
Tempering of steel — Affliction works qual- 
ity of character, 657. 
Temple of God cleared from sand-drift — 
Theology restored by evolution, 2242. 
defaced — Illness from abuse of 
body, 217. 
or hut for children — Sound body a pa- 
rental obligation, 137. 
Temptation described — Frugality, self- 
government, 698. 
Tenants in lodging-house — Inharmonious 

faculties, 383. 
Tendency in taste, education of — Prayer 
without ceasing, 1815. 



^34 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Tenderloin, eating the — Reading with dis 
crimination, 2449. 

Tenement abandoned — Emptiness of unbe- 
lief, 19S0. 

Tennyson and micioscopy — Belief with 
the heart, 403. 

Teredo ; conllagration — Sins, little and 
great, 1396. 

Thanatopsls — Death disrobing, not for 
sleep but glory, 330. 

Theater — Emotion pernicious if not prac- 
tical, 1497. 

Thermometer — Moral judgment important, 
1412. 
— Vacillation of Christian desires, 

— Susceptibility of man, 834. 
Thievery a hard master — Dishonesty un- 
profitable, 750. 
Thieves, drunkards, godly men : starting 

of children — Heredity, 41. 
Thin-skinned and thick-skinned — Sen- 
sitiveness, 777. 
Thistle, smiting the — Persecution spread- 
ing truth, 644. 
down, chewing — Pantheistic God un- 
satisfactory, 1 1 18. 
Thorn-hedge — Violation of social law 

punished, 852. 
Thread, black in white web — Teasing, 
784. 
in needle — Friend in household, 1274. 
rotten, in fabric — Social duty of health, 
918. 
Threshing out wheat — Right effect of 

trouble, 628. 
Throne, cold marble, or blazing with love 
— God's unselfishness, 1139. 
of iron; crystal; mystery; grace — In- 
terpretation of God, 1219. 
Thunder of summer shower — Love's anger, 

145. 
Thunderstorm, night, morning — Cruci- 
fixion, tomb, resurrection, 1253. 
Thunderstorms needed — Fanatical re- 
formers bring up average unfaithful- 
ness, 2380. 
Ticket to heaven — Religion not mechanical, 

1462. 
Tide ebbing — Act of dying, 297. 
favorable or opposite — Moods, 422. 
filling bay — Divine love in the soul, 

1748. 
floats shoaled ship — Religious depth re- 
lieves trouble, 1599. 
in bay — Vacillation of Christian de- 
sires, 1543. 
scientists and moon on — Earthly and 
heavenly power in reform, 1325. 
Tides — Emotional extremes, 411. 



Tides — Interchange of force, mental and 
physical, 1073. 
— The passions, 1358. 
rising of the — Upward progress of 
humanity, 2504. 
Tied up with nots — Popular conception of 

religion, 1483. 
Timber not growing tree — Church mem- 
bers with single creed, 21 10. 
straightening crooked — Correcting 

faults, 1650. 
tests of different — Temptableness vari- 
able, 1370. 
under strain — Men provedby trials, 671. 
Time-worn institutions not for to-day — 

Mummies not men, 2223. 
Tinder in certain faculties — Sensitiveness 

to injury, 816. 
Titian's pictures and pigments — Heaven in 

earthly conceptions, 324. 
Toadstool, not child, brought up on a 
rock — Wholesomeness of society, 833. 
Tonic, a moral — Fear, 1988. 
Tools, chest of, unpacked — Ignorance and 
education, 2427. 
discussion of — Theologizing, 2178. 
dull — Man's need of adversity, 629. 
fine, badly used — Heedlessness, poor 

thinking, 727. 
to be sharpened — Recreation after work, 

199. 

work mahogany — Bible study needs 
better instruments, 1952. 
unused — Child's faculties, 8. 
Tooth-drawing — Getting gifts from the 
grudging, 2390. 

— Imaginary troubles the worst, 
682. 
Torch, a guiding — Wit, 482. 

flame in open air — Variable Christian 

feeling, 213 1. 
lighted, in wind — Living aright, diflfi- 
cult, 839. 
Torpedo-mines in war — Danger-signals in 
crooked business, 569. 
unexploded — Combative disposition 

75»- 
Touchstone — God's child hears God's 

words, 1067. 
Tow and rope — Torpid nerves, small en- 
joyment, 444. 
Townsfolk all one name, meal-hour, etc. 

— Church unity valueless, 2081. 
Trade to be learned — Life, 927. 
Train laid by prayer, fired by life — Prayer 

interpreting God, 1809. 
Training not goading animals — Preaching 

through love not fear, 2251. 
Tramp l>eggar, the — Help better than 

almsgiving, 2408. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



^35 



Traveler changing direction — Conversion 
turning aright, 1587. 

in storm — Love beareth all things, 829. 

interrupted views of — Spiritual moods, 
1056. 

over bad roads — Church members, 2071. 
Treachery in the fort — Inconspicuous 

temptations, 137 1. 
Treason in the fortress — Infidelity in mar- 
riage, 122. 
Treasure misspent — Youthful excesses, 60. 

not diamond — Faith universal not single, 
2010. 
Tree bark-bound — Soul torpidity fosters 
disease, 1663. 

culture — Education changes size but not 
sort, 2412. 

disbranched — Losses of old age, 279. 

easily trained in youth — Childhood con- 
versions, 37. 

expansion of — The world's growth, 2469. 

fall of huge, in forest — Generous dread 
of bankruptcy, 560. 

grown crooked — Bad habits hard to 
change, 62. 

healing its wound — Restorative power 
of good, 2567. 

in forest — Limitations of society, 836. 
and in clearing — Social solidarity, 
875. 

overgrowing injury — God's forgiveness 
remedial, 1206. 

quick wrecking and slow decay — Sud- 
den death a blessing, 313. 

rooted in uncleanness — Hypocrisy, 769. 

sudden fall of old decayed — Violation of 
law punished, 190. 

tough-growing — Sources of people's 
strength, 962. 

transplanted in spring — Misfits in life, 

579- 
trunk needed for fruit — Worth of the 

church, 2175. 
varied aspects, to lumberman, poet, 

botanist, etc. — Man, 77. 
with buds, blossoms, and ripened fruit 

— Perseverance in well doing, 1603. 
one root — Rich man without gen- 
eral sympathy, 604. 
worn-out fruit — Degenerated ideals in 

age, 281. 
Trees — Description, 2584. 

along Hudson River — Righteousness 

thrives, 15 14. 
dropping ripe apples — Fruitful lives, 

1530. 
girdled — Sin destroys great natures, 

1417. 
old — Life of man associated with nature, 

2578. 



Trees put forth their own nature — Men, 
2274. 
resurrection of, eveiy spring — Born 

again, and again, 1595. 
roughness of — Literary carelessness of 

the Bible, 1847. 
varied in height — Democracy starts all 
on same level, 971. 
Trellis for grape-vine — Ritual not vital, 

2053- 

Triangle for wheel — Sincerity and wrong 
belief, 1977. 

Tribune or Times — Gospel-life of Christ 
to be read entire, 1919. 

Trip-hammer — Unsocial temper, 755. 

Triumph of ancient victor — " Abundant 
entrance " into heaven, 325. 

Tropical fruits and climate — Virtue de- 
pendent on love, 1757. 

Trough of sea, wave-crest — Adversity tests 
friendship, 672. 

Truce with enemy — Lenten intermission 
of sin, 1410. 

Trust in the pilot — Faith in God, 2023, 

Trumpet-calls to sleeping warriors — 
Hymns, 2063. 

Trumpeter and soldier — Pulpit and pew, 
2280. 

Trumpets, 400,000 angelic, no good — Or- 
dination by nature, 2277. 

Trunk lock picked, things unpacked — 
Science discovering truth, 2538. 

Truth-telling and lying — Laws of life gen- 
erally obeyed, 1037. 

Trying on garments — Testing sinfulness by 
Christ, 1569. 

Tulip-tree with blossoms — Popular refine- 
ment, 2494. 

Tumbler, cracked — Broken friendship, 
910. 

Tuning-fork — Heaven, standard for earth, 

1754. 
room of orchestra — This world a prepa- 
ration, 1677. 

Turf plowed up for seed — Reforms pre- 
ceded by agitation, 2369. 

Turkey-buzzards — Faultfinders, 778. 

Turkey walking and flying — Reason and 
faith, 2029. 

Turkeys trapped — Small faults baits for 
larger ones, 772. 

Twilight and sunrise — Fear and hope, 
1997. 
of dawn — Angelic ministration to Jesus, 
1921. 

Twins — Doubt and faith, 19S5. 

Tyndale, Scripture translation by — New 
truth by single men, 2358. 

Tyodall, experiment on light-spectrum — 
God passes comprehension, 1 109. 



f.36 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Typesetter — Automatic virtue, 1681. 
Typesetting exemplified — Doctrines 

proved by trial, 2221. 

Ulysses — Moral sense, taught and intuitive, 

459. 
Under-shot and over-shot wheel — Degrees 

of health, 183. 
tow of waves — God's promises sincere, 

1 2 10. 
on seashore — Almost saved from 
temptation, 14 1 5. 
Unfenced jwtalo-patch — Christian life out- 
side ciuircli, 2076. 
United States citizenship — Interchange of 

churcli membersliip, 2165. 
University — Life an education, 1466. 
Unsounded cave-depths — Future of wicked 

unknown, 2219. 
Up'tiill is down-hill — Approach to God 

easy, 1203. 
Upward fall — The fall of man, 221 1. 

Valetudinarian — Half-hearted religion, 

492. 
Valley, a lovely, after battle — Bible of 

conflict, 1959. 
Valleys among mountains — Beauties of 

Old Testament, 1877. 
without, no mountains — Poor sermons, 

2276. 
Vapor, clouds, rain — Interplay of human 

forces, 2467. 
Varied methods enrich the church — Public 

prayer to be natural, 21 18. 
Vase from artist-potter — Fasliioned by 

Christ, 1270. 
with water for flowers — Church a sus- 

tainer of Cliristian life, 2135. 
Vassar College — Wise giving, 2401. 
Vaudois — (jlory out of obscurity, 657. 
Vegetable and animal nature — Social 

interdependence, 832. 
kingdom needs all vegetal growtli — All 

churches form the Churcli, 2144. 
nature reproduces its kind — xMoods in 

home-training, 138. 
Veil for shelter — Secretiveness, 1386. 
Vermin in dark places — Dangers of ig- 
norance, 990. 
View from Mt. Washington — Times of the 

Patriarchs, 1892. 
Village, run-down — Preaching and public 

spirit, 969. 
Vine and trellis — Reputation and social 

connections, 903. 
clinging and climbing — Aspiration, 

1057. 
formed on tree — Experience fashions 

ideals of Christ, 1263. 



Vine in Labrador and in South — Heavenly 
growth completes earthly, 1057. 
throws out tendrils — Negro dependent, 
2518. 
Vines and grapes— Test of instrumentalities, 

2153- 
girdling tree — Perils of prosperity, 611. 
on the home — Church lineage interest- 
ing, not vital, 2136. 
twining about each other — Early mar- 
riages, III. 
Viol string, no discord from slack — Meek- 
ness not unprovokableness, 1751. 
Violation of trust — Carelessness criminal, 

728. 
Violence and strength — Beneficence of ad- 
versity, 638. 
Violet's perfume for others — Divine im- 
pulse of love, 1 172. 
Violin a true, makes others discordant — 
Reformers, 2368. 
decorated — Happiness interior not ex- 
ternal, 488. 
kept at concert pitch — Recreation neg- 
lected, 585. 
learning the — Spiritual skill gained by 

self-denial, 16 14. 
playing — Christian training, 1633. 
untuned — Concordant faculties for Chris- 
tian life, 171 1. 
with bow hung up — Transient religious 
feeling, 1487. 
Violinist's knowledge of strings — Jesus' 

knowledge of man, 1242. 
Vision, dazzling made definite — Hope and 
experience, 2001. 
times of, giving landmarks — Doubt il- 
luminated, 1986. 
Vital force in body — Christianity a divine 
incitement, 1308. 
functions specified — All agreeable, 
185. 
Voice of millions of men — Silence of bal- 
lot, 975. 
Volcanic conditions — Social unrest in 
Europe, 998. 
fires — Lustful passion, 425. 
Volcano crater — Knowledge of evil life, 

1366. 
Voltaire — Removing obstructions to truth, 

1974. 
Volume printed — Man's endless talking, 

781. 
Voyage for sake of coming joy — Bearing 
present troubles, 690. 

Walking and flying — Science and senti- 
ment, 2038. 
instinct in — Spontaneity of conscience, 
^339- 



WITH THOUGHTS 



637 



Walking stool for children — Miracles for 
early education, 2142. 
to California — Christian life easiest in 
church, 2087. 
Wall — Refinement not to be exclusive, 
1081. 
for defence — Secretiveness, 1386. 
high, of garden — Doctrine of total de- 
pravity hiding God, 2249. 
woman built in — Gold-gatherers self- 
immured, 615. 
Walls — Customs restrain conduct, 1440. 
Wall Street and Trinity — Market and 

Church, 539. 
War-horse, old — Lyman Beecher, 505. 
wounds and scars of — Biblical contro- 
versy hurtful, 1955. 
Warm house one blanket, cold house three 

— Sabbath needed by poor, 2042. 
Warmth and coolness of spirit — Fervency 

effective, 435. 
Warts on tongue — Slang, 790. 
Washing of body and of soul — Baptism 
declaratory not active, 2137. 
of feet — Lowly service, 1768. 
off filth — Repentance and reformation, 
1421. 
Washington and Burr — Superiority of 
moral element, 463. 
as president — American soldiers in civil 

office, 988. 
face of — Character and countenance, 

895. 

farewell letter of — Deuteronomy, 1897. 
Watch and watch-making machinery — 
Greater evidence of design, 11 28. 
destroying a — Varieties of evil-doing, 

1395- 
maker — Admiration not love, 1224. 
making — The world a place of prepara- 
tion, 2476. 
spring — The inward life, 1066. 
stopped to see if it goes — Microscopic 

conscience, 1337. 
to tell time by — World good for its pur- 
pose, 546. 
ungathered parts of — Life in this world 
unfinished, 2477. 
Watches unregulated — False ideals, 538. 
Watchmaker seeking right tool — Finding 

sermon-subject, 2318. 
Watchman not asleep — Heavenly wel- 
come, 326. 
Water; artificial drinks — Common-sense 
better than uncommon, 360. 
bearing boats — Church organ music and 

congregation, 2060. 
drops and ocean — Individuals and com- 
munity, 874. 

in river levee — Petty cheating, 747. 



Water fowl, swimming, walking, flying — 
Grades of motive in conduct, 458. 

from mist to ocean — Power of weak 
things in combination, 2501. 

in well-plumbed house — Spontaneous 
virtue, i486. 

logged timbers — Anxiety may paralyze, 

739. 
power and mill — God the mover, man 

the actor, 436. 
purified by activity — Health, 179. 
Watering-pot not Niagara — Equality of 
poor and good workman impossible, 
2497. 
Wave changes shore — Life affects soul, 

357- 
crest, trough of sea — Adversity tests 
friendship, 672. 
Wayside blossoms — Environment not all, 

662. 
Wax and rock ; sun and frost — Prosperity 
and adversity, 627. 
softened by fire — Hearts under afflic- 
tion, 227. 
Weak of the army — Falling by the way in 

humanity's march, 2533. 
Weather, clear or cloudy — Condition for 

work, 388. 
Weathercocks and their upright rods — 

Human and divine guidance, 2015. 
Weaving, flaw in the — Duty and destiny, 
446, 
permanent patterns of — Mother's influ- 
ence, 139. 
Web of insincerity, thread of truth — Flat- 
tery, 772. 

spider and of silk-worm — Uses of 
refinement, 849. 
woven — Nature of character, 892, 
Wedges single — Single instances, 1725. 
Weed poisonous self-sowing — Propagation 

of evil, 1424, 
Weeds amid crops — Religious fervor to be 
regulated, 1 501. 
in rich soils — Faults in full natures, 404. 
kept down — Avoidance of evil, nega- 
tive, 1029. 
Webster on Shakespeare — Most delightful 

parts of Bible, 1968. 
Weeping willows — Seekers of suffering, 

1994. 
Weighing sugar and coffee — Equivalent 

theory of heaven, 1467. 
Weights on scale — Christian choice im- 
mediate, 1574. 
Well bought goods half-sold — Heredity to 
be more studied, 2464. 
digging — God's severe dealings, 677. 
never dry — Mother's heart, 147. 
Wellesley College — Wise giving, 2401. 



638 



INDEX OF ILLUSTRATIONS 



Wells in desert; cup of water — Heavenly 
reward, 340. 
quickly dug — Sudden intimacies shallow, 
908. 
Wesley, John and Charles — Humble be- 
ginnings of greatness, 643. 

— Sleep not gauged by other's 
needs, 205. 
and the English Church — Primitive 

Christianity and Judaism, 2133. 
revolt against bishop — New truth from 
single men, 2355. 
Whatsoever things are true — Scientific 

truth is Christian, 2456. 
Wheat and chaff — Equality of all wages 
absurd, 2498. 
from old straw — Sermon on the Mount, 

2228. 
growing on straw — Biblical truths of 

inspiration, 1876. 
in the grass — Morality a beginning, 

1024. 
thrown away, chaff eaten — Rejecting 
New Testament miracles, 19 16. 
Wheelbarrow, wagon — Material improve- 
ments Christian, 2466. 
Whetstones, God's — Dangers of wealth, 

601. 
Whip of scorpions — Creed used for dis- 
cipline, 2185. 
syllabub of life — Novels, 2445. 
Whipped child kissing mother — Prayer of 

duty, 1817. 
Whipping boy with clothes on — Tempered 

affliction, 667. 
Whirlpool — Dissipation increasingly dan- 
gerous, 61. 
Whirlwind — Selfishness and love in con- 
flict, 1786. 
under law — Orderly disorder in world, 

2534- 

White Mountains, summit of — Silences of 
New Testament, 1918. 

Whittling pine and lignum vitse — Sym- 
pathy seeks the needy, 1770. 

Wick just kindled — Spiritual life begins 
uncertainly, 1598. 

Widow's mites — Genuine benevolence in- 
fluential, 2406. 

— Gifts of love lasting, 2407. 

Wife faithful, husband faithless — Per- 
sistence of love, 1788. 
newly married — Geniality in Christian 
life, 1579. 

Wild beasts in dark recesses — Paseions to 
be avoided, 1361. 
boar desolating garden — Conflicts over 
Bible, 1957. 

Wilderness— Unbelief, 1970. 

Wildfire — Speaking evil, 787, 



Wilding pear set in garden — Good man 

bettered in church, 2077. 
Will and won't — Elect and non-elect, 2204. 
Willow brancli rooting in own soil — Child 

well brought up, 154. 
Wilson, Henry, shoemaker and senator — 

Greatmindedncss in humble callings, 

50. 
Winchester Cathedral — The Bible's asso- 
ciations, 1844. 
orders of architecture in — Biblical unity 

in diversity, 1961. 
Wind for cockle-boat and ship — Needless 

talk, 780. 
in malarial regions — Freedom of speech, 

2374- 
less, more sails — Impulses towards 

Christian life, 1548. 
northeast — Dispositions vary, 807. 
sowing seeds on prairie — Temptation 
seeks the lazy, 1377. 
Window darkened by spider-webs — Truth 
obscured by dull preaching, 2304. 
finer than furniture — Spiritual views 

from New Testament, 19 14. 
light shut out — Preaching without imag- 
ination, 2314. 
vision through — Holy Spirit works 
through man, 1313. 
Windows —Books, 2335. 

painted — Symbolism of worship in repe- 
tition, 2052. 
towards heaven — Troubles, 639. 
Wine forcing cork from bottle — Prayer 
from emotion, 1808. 
of being — Power of personality, 868. 
strong, diluted for drinking — Jesus' 
teaching humanized by apostles, 
1240. 
turned to vinegar — Character soured in 
age, 275. 
Wings — Emotional effect of hymns, 1496. 
— Church singing, 2068. 
of angels — Man's access to God, 1142. 
Winnowing machine and wind — Spiritual 

life subject to natural law, 1672. 

Winter and spring on fertile land — Life 

without and with religion, 1442. 

defied by New England boy — Braving 

trouble, 648. 

Wistaria — Aspiration undeveloped, 1085. 

Wit recognized by mirthfulness — Feeling 

before reason, 407. 
Wood for shelter or pleasure — Classes for 
use not mastery, 933. 
thrush in grove — Solitude, 841. 
Wool growing, spinning, and weaving — 
Providence and natural law, 1166. 
sheep's, in royal robe — Suffering means 
elevation, 259. 



WITH THOUGHTS 



639 



Woolsey, Miss — Woman's servitude in 
love, a glory, 97. 

Word associations vary — Unity of worship 
impossible, 2054. 

Work measured by wages — Love measured 
by love, 115. 

Workman, the happy — Power of cheerful- 
ness, 486. 

World forces — External helpful pulpit in- 
fluences, 2338. 

Worldly pursuits — External harmful pulpit 
influences, 2339. 

Worm-eaten ship — Corruption in public 
affairs, 1007. 

Worms at wine-cask — Small meannesses 
empty the heart, 716. 

Worry — Rust on the blade, 1992. 
about bread — Baker, 625. 
needless — Hills ahead, but slight as- 
cents, 743. 

Wrecked manner — Christian help at crit- 
ical time, 2086. 



Wrecker's boat saving few — Christianity 

aims to save humanity, 2543. 
Write, boy learning to — Transgression as 
education, 2432. 
learning to — iSclf-righteousness sign of 
low attainment, 1628. 

— Training in righteousness, 1624. 



Yachts and war-ships — City missions and 

churches, 2093. 
Yard not measure of prayer — Quality not 

quantity, 1813. 
Year, the, a cyclopedia of beauty — The 

beauty-revealing God, 2570. 
Yeast — Temptation works in secrecy, 

1378. 

Zero — Extremes and means in morals, 445. 
man born at, in everything — No original 
sin or righteousness, 2215. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Abandoning Beliefs, Danger in, 1979. 
" Abhor That Which is Evil," 1379. 
Abiding Influence of Christ, 1259. 

Joy, 1746. 
Abstract Doctrine, Concrete Truth Bet- 
ter than, 2305. 
Abundant Entrance Into Heaven, 325. 
Achievement Demands Further Achieve- 
ment, 478. 

Happiness in, 552. 
Measure of, 455. 
Act of Dying, the, 297. 
Action a Health-Giver, 179. 
Emotion in, 442. 
Feeling in, 127. 
Active and Passive Evil, 922. 
Activity, Duty of, 536. 

of Christian Faith, 2026. 
Outruns Trouble, 555. 
Quality in, 548. 
the Condition of Vitality, 1606. 
Adam as a Type, 70. 

Responsibility for, 2212. 
Scriptural Treatment of, 2210. 
Adaptation to the Times, 2279. 
Admiration, Nobleness Compels, 867. 

not Love, 1224. 
Adoption, Grounds of, 1571. 
Advance of Truth by Science, 2538. 
Advantage in Organized Charity, 2403. 
Adversity, 633. 

and Prosperity, 627, 
Beneficence of, 638. 
Heroes of, 640. 
Man's Need of, 629. 
Nobility in, 676. 
Recuperation under, 669. 
Sweetness after, 635. 
in, 691. 
Affinity and Benevolence, 2391. 
Affliction and Its Comfort, 239. 
Fire of, 651. 
Joy in, 224. 
Age, Approach of, 283. 
Blessedness of, 273. 
Ages to Come, the, 2507. 

Upward Movement of the, 2542. 
Agreement as to Vital Elements, 1889. 
Aggressiveness, 754. 
Agnosticism, 1112. 
Alcoholic Drinking, Danger of, 1374. 



All Churches Needed for the Church, 
2144. 

Elements Needed, 2085. 

Graces, the Mother of, 1687. 

Important Element, the, 1478. 

Men, the Preacher All Things to, 
2284. 

Religion Acceptable to, 1455. 

One in Christ Jesus, 2082. 

Scripture Profitable, 1968. 
Almost a Christian, 1557. 

Saved, 14 15. 
Alms and Benevolence, 2405. 
Almsgiving, 2393. 

Better Than, 2408. 
America, Converting the Chinese in, 

lOOI. 

the Chinese in, 2523. 

the Common Language of, 2522. 
American Armies, Disbanding of, 984. 

Confidence in the Future, 1014. 

Negro, the, 2519. 

Political Elasticity, 989. 
America's Prosperity and Peril, 990. 
Am I a Christian, 1742. 
Amusement Discriminated, 54. 
Amusements, Immigration and Freedom 

of, 1000. 
Anarchism and Communism, 996. 
Ancient Names, 1898. 

Revelations Commonplace, 1885. 
Anger of Love, the, 145. 

Truth in, 951. 
Angelic Ministrations, the, 1921. 
Animals First and Then Men, 9, 
Annihilation, Unnatural Idea, 338. 
Annoyance by Commentators, 1954. 
Another Life, Man's Need of, 350. 
Antiquated Thought-Forms, 2197. 
Antiquity of New Truths, 1841. 
Anxiety, 739. 

and Trust, 2022. 
Apocalypse, the, 1949. 
Apocalyptic Figures, 2262. 
Apostolic Heresy, 2190. 
Quality, the, 2172. 
Succession, 2278. 
Appearing Before God, 292. 
Appetites and Passions, 193. 

Right use of, 47. 
Appreciative Gratitude, 1096. 



641 



642 



INDEX OF TITLES 



ArPROACii of Age, 283. 
Death, 2S6. 
the Civil War, 981. 
Aptness of Jesus' Parables, 1926. 
Ardent Preacher, the, 2271. 
Arminianism and Calvinism, 2201. 
Artificial Religious Symbols, 2549. 

Style in Speaking, 2298. 
Artistic Goodness, 461. 
As a Hen Gathereth Her Chickens, 1272. 

Little Child, 1235. 

Little Children, 1784. 
Ashamed of Christian Parentage, 63. 
AsPEN-Tree, the, 2582. 
Aspiration, 1057. 

Exacting, 1662. 

Men Without, 1085. 

of Prayer, 1805. 
Assassination of Lincoln, 246. 
Associating with those in Error, 15 12. 
Association, Power of, 842. 
Associations, the Bible Dear from, 1872. 

with Nature, 2578. 
At Home and Abroad, 847. 
Atmosphere of Growth, the, 1604. 
Atmospheric Christianity, 15 15. 
Atonement, Human Side of, 1290. 

the, 1289. 
Atoning Love, 11 57. 
Attraction, 1329. 

Attractive Presentation of Truth, 231 1. 
Audience Not to be !?cattered, 2121. 
Automatic Virtues, 1681. 
Authority and Church Councils, 2157. 

Influence Higher Than, 972. 

in Thinking, 2107. 
Average Congregation, the, 2334. 
Avoidance of Evil, 1029. 

Baby, the, i. 

Possibilities, 2416. 
Background of Life, the, 314. 
Bad, Neither Good nor, 445. 

Habits, 62. 

Pertinacity of, 725. 

Temper, Sin of, 169. 
Ballot, the, 974. 
Balm of Nature, the, 2585. 

Sympathy, the, 880. 
Bankruptcy, Generous Dread of, 560. 

Manliness in, 561. 
Baptism, 2137, 

Forms of, 1923. 

of Suffering, the, 271. 
Basilar Elements, Importance of, 475. 
Bearing AfBictions, 227. 

but not Overborne, 1248. 

of Trouble, 258. 

Present Troubles, 690. 

the Cross, 1726. 



Bearing the Reproach of Christ, 639. 
Beatitudes, the, 1932. 
Beautiful Age, 284. 

Surrender, 687. 

the Kingdom of the, 2570. 
Beautifying of Character, 73. 
Beauty Inherently Divine, 2572. 

of Death, 298. 
Habit, 835. 
Holiness, 1505. 
Man, Manhood the, 79. 
Moral Character, 1735. 
Woman, the, 95. 
Begin Humbly, Willingness to, 157. 
Beginning Life Aright, 64. 

of Spiritual Life, 1573. 
Beginnings of Character, 899. 

the New Life, 1597. 
Being Praised, Dangers of, 2306. 
Belief and Imagination, 1976. 

Sincerity and Correctness of, 1977. 

with the Heart, 403. 
Benefactions of Inventors, 2531. 
Beneficence of Adversity, 638. 
God, 1 131. 
Wealth, 601. 

Spirit of, 1 171. 
Benefits, Memory of, 1093. 
Benevolence and Affinity, 2391. 
Alms, 2405. 
Generosity, 2386. 
Personal Love, 2392. 

Generosity not, 2388. 

Limited, 2387. 

Needs Force, 2397. 
Benumbing Effect of Suffering, 253, 
Bereavement Expansive of Life, 270. 
Best Church, the, 2168. 

Give God the, 1535. 

Ministers, the, 2315. 
Better Life, Decision for the, 1545. 

than Almsgiving, 2408. 
Betterment, IJivine Law of, 2532. 
Between Sorrow and Gladness, 255. 
Bible a Growth, the, 1837. 
Map, the, i860. 

Infant Humanity in the, 2470. 

an Everyday Book, the, 1846. 

as Furniture, the, 1859. 

Blind Reading of the, 1857. 

Buried under Rubbish, the, 1953. 

Coeval with Man's Need, the, 1S83. 

Combative Reading of the, 1958. 

Conflict Over the, 1957. 

Dear from Associations, the, 1872. 

Essential Quality of the, 1836. 

Guidance, Breadth of, 1873. 

How to read the, 1852. 

Immutability of the, 1913. 

Indispensable, the, 1863. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



643 



lilBLE, Inspiiation of llic, 1S67. 
Many-Sitiedncss of llic, 1S45. 
Not a Book of War, the, 1955. 

Dependent on any One of its 

Books, the, i960. 
Exhausted, the, 1879. 
of Conflict, the, 1959. 
Outside Light on the, 1843. 
Per]K-tuity of the, 1912. 
Reading, 1S48. 
Right use of the, 1834. 
Seminal Character of the, 1966. 
Skimming the, 1856. 
Study Needs Better Instruments, 1952. 
Symbolism of the, 1902. 
the : Reading for Cure, 1853. 
Unity in Diversity, 1961. 
World Interprets the, 1838. 
Theological Transformation of the, 

1956. 
to be Practiced, the, 161 2. 
True Significance of the, 1847. 
Unfound Treasures in the, 1861. 
Unknown Beauties in the, 1866. 
Unused Parts of the, 1875. 
" What Readers Find in the, 1849. 
Biblical Criticism, 1964. 

Exactitude a Fatal Claim, 1888. 
Statements, Incompleteness of, 1881. 
Bird Nature, 2579. 
Bird's Lesson, a, 2580. 
Blessed are the Meek, 1 100. 
Merciful, iioi. 
Peacemakers, 1102. 
They that mourn, 241. 
Who Hunger and Thirst After 
Righteousness, 1 103. 
Blessedness of Age, 273. 

Work, 553. 
Blessing in Trouble, 634. 
Blind Reading of the Bible, 1857. 
Bodily Exercise, 206. 

Health for Mental Vigor, 194. 
Body and Brain, Rest for, 2040. 
Soul, 652. 
Care of the, 184. 
for Earth, the, 210. 
Marvels of the, 181. 
Nourishing the Soul, the 1018. 
of Christ, the, 879. 
the, a Living Sacrifice, 192. 
Book of Revelations, the, 195 1. 
Ruth, the, 1900. 
the, 1844. 

Heart Makes Known the, 1840. 
Books, 2435. 

Ministry of, 2436. 

Bible not Dependent on any One of 
its, i960. 
Border Line, a, 2577. 



BoKN Again, 15S6. 

— and Again, 1595. 
BoRRowiNr. Trouble, 681. 
Boys, i8. 
Brain Power, Value Measured by, 2496. 

the : Money : the Heart, 559. 
Brains and Climate, 440. 
Brave Bearing of Trouble, 674. 
Braving Trouble, 648. 
Breadth of Bible-Guidance, 1873. 
Brief Attachments, 107. 
Brilliant Ministers, 2292. 
Broad Views of Truth, 105 1. 
Broken Friendships, 910. 
Brotherhood and Equality, 2495. 

Growing, 2530. 
Building of the Soul, 1659. 
Business and Religious Feeling, 584. 

Crafty devices in, 565. 

Christianity in, 566. 

Danger-Signals, 569. 

Depression Demoralizing, 700. 

Men, Virtues of, 588. 

of the Church, the, 2141. 

Retiring from, 586. 

Unfavorable to Meditation, 556. 
By their Fruits, 1734. 

Call to Church Membership, a, 2071. 
Calvinism and Arminianism, 2201. 
Democracy, 2202. 

Power of, 2200. 
Calvinistic Shadows, 2205. 
Captain of Our Salvation, the, 1276. 
Care, 736. 

Live Above, 740. 

of the Body, 184. 
Careless Bible Reading, 1858. 
Carelessness a Crime, 728. 
Cares not to be Emphasized, 738. 
Casting Care on God, 1830. 
Causality, Sureness of, 190. 
Cause and EfTect, 1401. 
Caution in Religion, 1470. 

with New Ideas, 2343. 
Certainty of Trouble, 630. 
Change of Social Relationships, 853. 

Realization of, 1576. 
Changes, Time for, 2232. 
Changing Moods and Powers, 422. 

Value of Creeds, 2198. 
Character and Countenance, 895. 
Reputation, 897. 

Beautifying of, 73. 

Beginnings of, 899. 

Building, 480. 

Commercial Credit and, 900. 

Compensation in, 390, 

De})th of, 907. 

Future Disclosure of, 349. 



644 



INDEX OF TITLES 



CllAKACTi'.K, Innucncc of, S65. 

Maturing of, 1705. 

Nature of, 892. 

Single Traits No Test of, 470. 

Slow Growtli of, 1638. 

Substance in, 1644. 

the Finishing of, 1714. 
Test of Success, 622. 

Three Tests of, 479. 

to be Perfected, 1593. 

Training of, 428. 
Charity Begins at Home, 2384. 
Chastening — Now and Afterwards, 263. 

Love, 144. 
Cheer of Hope, 2003. 
Cheerfulness, 806. 

in Religion, 500. 

Mercy with, 823. 

Power of, 486. 
Cheerless Soul-Culture, 491. 
Cheerlessness of Doubt, 1971. 
Chicago Fire, the : a Lesson of Heroism, 

2540. 
Child and Mother, 139. 

Christ in the Child- Heart, a, 38. 

Training and Christian Training, 673. 
Continuous, not Spasmodic, 10. 
Childhood Disciples, 29. 

of Jesus, the, 1227. 
Childish Lack of Faith, 2032. 
Children, 13. 

and God's Handiwork, 40. 
the Old Testament, 27. 

Conversion of, 37. 

Courtesy Due to, 19. 

Forgiveness of, 16. 

God's Love for His, 1140. 
Mothering of His, 1201. 

Lessons Taught by, 36. 

Lies to, 20. 

Long Words to, 34. 

Loss of, 223. 

Present Duties for, 31. 

Sensitiveness of, 33. 

Sunday and the, 26. 

the Invisible Ministry of, 42. 

Undue Anxiety foi', 39. 
Chinese in America, Converting the, looi. 

the, 2523. 
Choice, Conviction Without, 1544. 
Choosing a Life-Partner, 112. 

and Desiring, 51. 
Christ, Abiding Influence of, 1259. 

and Hebraism, 1243. 

Bearing the Reproach of, 639. 

Coming to, 1287. 

Conceptions of, 1295. 

Controversies about, 1938. 

Experience Fashions Our Ideal of, 
1263. 



Christ, Fashioned by, 1270. 

for Man, not Institutions, 1798. 

God in, II 5 1. 

(iratitudc to, 1269. 

Heart in the Christian Ministry, the, 

2353- 
How to Find, 1556. 
How to read the Life of, 19 19. 
in You, 1285, 

a Growth, 1646. 
Jesus, All One in, 2082. 
Knowledge of, 1271. 
Life, Convincing Beauty of the, 1279. 
Limitations of God in, 1255. 
Love tokens to, 1277. 
New Ideals Given by, 1048. 
Our Hope, 1218. 
Power of, 1265. 
Practical Use of, 1262. 
Radicalism of, 1242. 
Salvation Through, 1275. 
Spirit, Unconscious Beauty of the, 

1792. 
the Body of, 879. 

Divinity of, 1281. 

Door, 1284. 

Higher View of, 1223. 

Humiliation of, 1226. 

Nature of, 1 222. 

Only Standard, 1261. 

Power of, 1258. 

School of, 1722. 

Soul's Image of, 1266. 
to be Confessed, 1547. 

Learned, 1648. 
Unconfessed, 1546. 
Variously Preached, 22 1 7. 
Visions of, 1296. 
Working with, 1294. 
Youthful Eclipse of, 1229. 
Christian Activity, 1728. 
Almost a, 1557. 
and Worldly Living, 1713. 
Change of Nature, 1651. 
Choice, the, 1574. 
Conception of Deity, the, 1256. 
Courtesy, 889. 

Democracy, Elevation of, 2526. 
Esprit de Corps, 2150. 
Faith, Activity of, 2026. 

Comfort in, 2034. 
Fragrance, the, 165. 
Hope, Self-Deception in, 1601. 
Household, Potency of a, 161. 
Joy, Worldly and, 503. 
Kindness, Spontaneity of, 1781. 
Life a Study, 1578. 
Courtesy in, 1495. 
Enlargement of, 1645. 
Geniality in, 1579. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



645 



Christian Life, Impulses towards, 154S. 
Objections to the, 145 1. 
Requires Training, 1622. 
the, a Lifc-Woik, 1484. 

Church a Sustainerof, 2135. 
Course of, 1629. 
Living, Early Hindrances in, 1627. 

Church Helpfulness in, 2076. 
Love, Phases of, 1683. 
Men Cannot be Disfellowshiped, 2159. 
Ministry, the Christ-Heart in the, 

2353' 

Parentage, Ashamed of, 63. 

Self-Exainination, 1665. 

the, in the World, 15 16. 

Training, 1633. 

and Child Training, 673. 

Truth for All, 1660. 

Unity, 2361. 
Christianity and Commerce, 2094. 
Orthodoxy, 1725. 

for All of Life, 1522. 

Fruits of the Spirit Make, 1457. 

in Business, 566. 

Judged by Its Professors, 1502. 

Medicinal Power of, 2381. 

not Stoicism, 236. 

Original, and Improved, 2193. 

Scope of, 1480. 

Sorrow Not Typical of, 252. 

the World the Place for, 1721. 

Unconscious Preparation for, 1575. 

W^hat is, 1308. 

Without Love, 1776. 
Christians, Different Kinds of, 2096. 

Not Made Instantly, 1608. 

Outside of the Church, 2088. 
Christ's Interpretation of God, 1175. 

Judgments, Interior, not Exterior, 
1245. 

Mediatorship, 1268. 

Methods of Illustration, 2300. 

Motive, Our Need, 1280. 

Peace, Slow Growth of, 2463. 

Preaching, 2341. 

Representation of Jehovah, 11 50. 

Valuation of Humanity, 5. 

Works of Mercy, 1232. 
Church a Hospital, the, 2078. 

Natural Development, the, 2134. 
Sustainer of Christian Life, the, 

2135- 
All Churches Needed for the, 2144. 
and Religion, the, 2167. 

the Man, the, 2101. 

the World, the, 2358. 
Councils and Authority, 2157. 
Discipline, 21 1 1. 
Christians Outside of the, 2088. 
Exclusiveness, 2174. 



Church, Faith in the, 68. 

for Sinners, the, 20go. 

Good Men Bettered in the, 2077. 

Helpfulness in Christian Living, 2076. 

Interchange Wholesome, 2165. 

Joining the, 2074. 

Life, Partisanship in, 2155. 

Lineage Interesting — Not Vital, 2136. 

Making, Self-Help in, 2113. 

Man's Servant, the 2102. 

Members to be Trained, 2105. 

Membership, a Call to, 2071. 
Duty of, 2075. 
Variety in, 2079. 

Militant, the, 2151. 

of the P'uture, the, 2160. 

Organ Music, 2060. 

Religion and the, 1489. 

Singing, 2068. 

the Business of the, 2141. 
Market and the, 539. 
Worth of the, 2175. 

Unity, 208 1. 

Weakness of the, 2097. 

Work, Past and Future, 2109. 
Churchks, Class-feeling in, 2099. 

Lack of Christian Sympathy in, 2098. 

Mixed Elements in, 2100. 

Need Excitement, 2124. 
Churchly Forms, the Value of, 2169. 
Circumstances, Influence Independent 

of, 374. 
Cities, National Importance of, 1012. 
City and Country Sabbaths, 2045. 

Evils of the, 838. 

Missions, 2092. 
Civic Preaching, 2363. 
Civil Governments, 956. 

Institutions, Human Defences, 961. 

Office, Military Americans in, 988. 

War, Approacli of the, 981. 
Civilization, Health the Mainspring of, 

178. 
Class- Feeling in Churches, 2099. 
Classes, the, 932. 
Clay and the Potter, the, 1126. 
Clean Athletics, 209. 
Cleansing Power of Great Troubles, 267. 
Clear and Cloudy Mental Weather, 388. 
Climate and Brains, 440. 
Clothed Upon, Not Unclothed, but, 330. 
Cloud of Witnesses, the, 533. 

Sympathetic Witnesses, the, 1092. 
Clouded Vision, 1055. 
Cold-hearted Preachers, 2273. 
Colonial Liberty, Growth of, 963. 
Combative Disposition, 751. 

Reading of the Bible, 1958. 
Comhination, Weak Units Mighty in, 
2501. 



646 



INDEX OF TITLES 



CoMl'OKT in C!iiisti;m Faith, 2034. 
Trouble, 256. 
of Merc Symiiixlliy, 885. 

OlMKORTING Goil, the, M35. 

CoMiNc; Day, the, 2506. 

to Christ, 1287. 

Triumph of Meekness, 1779. 
CoMMKNTATORS, Annoyance by, 1954. 
Commerce and Cliristianity, 2094. 

Moral Intelligence of, 589. 
Commercial Credit and Character, 900. 

Death and Resurrection, 680. 
Common Language of America, the, 2522. 

Schools, the, 2420. 

Sense Better than Uncommon, 360. 
Commune of 187 1, the, 935. 
Communion Day, 2057. 

Invitation to the, 2056. 
Communism and Anarchism, 996. 
Communities and Individuals, 874. 

not Institutions, 2170. 
Community of Feeling, 872. 
Compensation in Character, 390. 
Complaint, Unmanliness of, 580. 
Complementary Natures, 2084. 
Complete Life, 285. 
Complexity of Life, 382. 

Man's Nature, 381. 
Compliments, 947. 

Comradeship in the Public Schools, 2421. 
Conceit, 761. 

in Moralities, 1543. 

Narrowness of, 2267. 

of Strength, 664. 

Wise in His Own, 397. 
Conceptions of Christ, 1295. 
God, 1121. 
Heaven, 324. 
Concord, not Unison, 2164. 
Concordant Faculties, 17 10. 
Concrete Truth Better than Abstract 

Doctrine, 2305. 
Condemnation and Hope Reconciled, 
1 3 10. 

not Reformation, 2375. 
Condiment, Fiction a, 2447. 
Condition, Inequalities of, 699. 
Conditions of Salvation, 2257. 
Conduct, Self-knowledge as to, 800. 

Society's Right to Control, 921. 
Conference- Meeting, the, 2120. 
Confessed Christianity a Safeguard, 2089. 
Confession Lessens Temptation, 1378. 
Conflict Leading to Peace, 2373. 

Over the Bible, 1957. 

Selfishness and Love in, 1786. 

the Bible of, 1959. 
Confusion, Peace Begins in, 2382. 
Conor KOATioNAL Singing, 2067. 
Congregationalism, 2158. 



Conscience and Love, 1799. 
Reason, 1342. 

Deterioration in Public, loi I. 

Dimming of, 1349. 

for Others, 1347. 

Humor the Friend of, 1336. 

Sins Under, 1346. 

Spontaneity in, 1339. 

Sullying of, 1348. 

Sundays and Week-Days, 1 34 1. 

the Department, 1338. 
Guide, 1345. 

Works Evil and (Jood, 1335. 

Wrong Use of, 1332. 
Consecration of Natural Gifts, 94. 
Conscious Sonship, 1538. 
Conservativeness in Religion, 1500. 
Consider the Sensitive, 827. 
Constancy of God's Goodness, 12 16. 
Constitution of United States, 964. 
Contentment with Mortality Unnatural, 

337. 
Continuance, Hunger for, 342. 
Continuing Instant in Prayer, 1S14. 

Regeneration, the, 1724. 
Control of the Tongue, 782. 
Controversies about Christ, 1938. 
Conversion a Change of Method, 1561. 
Good Start, 1587. 

and Sanctification, 1594. 

but the start, 1583. 

Not Mode, but Fact, of, 1582. 
Perfection, 1588. 

of Children, 37. 
Conversions Like the Dawn of Morning, 

^539- 
Converting the Chinese in America, 

lOOI. 

Conviction of Sin, 1570. 

Without Choice, 1544. 
Cooperation, Divine and Human, 1305. 
Cooperative Capital, Dangers of, 2505. 
Corinthians, ist, XIII, 1945. 
Corporate Wealth in Politics, loio. 
Corrigible Faults, 1650. 
Creation, Perfected Manhood the Idea 

of, 76. 
Creative Process, Waste in the, 2558. 
Corrupter, Indolence a, 530. 
Corrupters of the Young, 1402. 
Corruption in Public Affairs, 1007. 

with Propriety, 1034. 
Cosmic Center of Peace, 1 148. 
Cost of Good, the. 658. 
Countenance and Character, 895. 
Counterparts in Married Life, 116. 
Country Rest, 2554. 
Courage, the Lower and the Higher, 

1249. 
Under Failure, 679. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



647 



CcMiRSK of Cluislian Life, tlie, 1629. 
Courtesy Due to Children, 19. 

in Christian Life, 1495. 
Coveting, 749. 
Cradle, Lessons from the, 3. 
Crafty Devices in Business, 565. 
Creation, Divine Inspiration not, 1306. 
Creative Design by Evolution, 2237. 
Credit for Eftbrt Rather than Result, 456. 

Effort the Measure of, 1389. 
Creed, Oneness of, 21 10, 
Creeds and Confessions, Danger of, 2186. 
Religion, 1508. 

Changing Value of, 2198. 
Crime, Carelessness a, 728. 

Preparation for, 1400. 
Criminality — Casual and Habitual, 1403. 
Critical Decisions, 1469. 

Moments for Reformation, 1414. 

Season, the, 43. 

Time, Help at the, 2086. 
Criticism, the Habit of, 776. 
Croakers, 757. 

Crooked Business, Self-Deceptionin,568. 
Crucifixion, the Tomb, the Resurrection, 

the, 1253. 
Cruel Views of God, 2216. 
Cruelty of Man, 82. 
Cumbering Prosperity, 620. 
Cry of the Penitent, the, 1826. 
Cryptic Parables of Jesus, 2448. 
Cultivated, Spiritual Grace to be, 1695. 
Cultivation and Humanity, 75. 
Culture, Effects of, 1673. 

Possibilities in, 32. 

Selfishness of, 376. 
Cumulative Violations of Law, 1404. 
Curative Life-Power, 2176. 

Mountains, the, 2563. 
Cure of Ignorance, the, 2429. 

Malign Feelings, to, 949. 

Reading the Bible, for, 1853. 

Damages of Money-Getting, 576. 
Danger in Abandoning Beliefs, 1979. 

Dalliance, 1363. 

Organized Charity, 2404. 
Line in Morals, the, 1355. 
of Alcoholic Drinking, 1374. 

Creeds and Confessions, 2 1 86. 

Labor Unions, 930. 
the Soul in, 2125. 
Dangerous Lies, 718. 
Dangers of Being Praised, 2306. 

Codperative Capital, 2505. 

Refinement, 377. 

Ritual, 2053. 

Smartness, 570. 

Unseen Indulgence, 1360. 
Daring, Varieties of, 472. 



Darkness, Love-Light in, 218. 

Luminous Hours after, 1763. 
Darwinian Hypothesis, the, 2238. 
David, the Warrior, 1910. 
Dear Ones Gone, 265. 
Death, a Grade, 288. 

Approach of, 286. 

Beauty of, 298. 

Forethinkings About, 293. 

Glory of, 303. 

Going Home, 310. 

Hour, a Hope for the, 305. 

is Life, 309. 

Jewish View of, 302. 

Mourning for, 257. 

Near to, 291. 

Not an Exile, 308. 

of Jesus Foreknown by Him, 1247. 
Sleep, the, 202. 

Preparation for, 307. 

Repose of, 300. 

Solitariness of, 304. 

the Hope in, 295. 
River of, 306. 

Transplanting of, 312. 

Uncertainty and Certainty of, 289. 
Deceitfulness of Temptation, 1375. 
Decision for the Better Life, 1545. 
Decoration, Nobility Before, 477. 
Deeds Done, Persistence of, 1420. 

Expression by, 1080. 
Deep Emotion not Common, 418. 
Degrees of Health, 183. 
Deity, the Christian Conception of, 1256. 
Sun as a Symbol of, 2560. 

Varying Conceptions of, 11 23. 
Delayed Answer to Prayer, 1820. 
Delicacy, 409. 

of God, the, 1202. 
Delight of Peace after War, 2520. 
Democracy and Calvinism, 2202. 

of the Public School, 2422. 
Democratic Self-Government, 933. 
Denominationalism, 2145. 
Departed Children, 231. 
Department Conscience, the, 1338. 
Depth of Character, 907. 
Design, Larger Evidence of, 11 28. 
Desiring and Choosing, 51. 
Despised Blessings, 1197. 
Despotism in Russia, 2517. 
Destiny and Duty, 446. 
Destruction in Evil Courses, 1416. 

Regulation not, 450. 
Desultory Action, 732. 
Deterioration in Public Conscience, 

lOII. 

Deuteronomy, 1897. 
Developing Woman, the, 93. 
Development, 1620. 



648 



INDEX OF TITLES 



DiVKi.orMK.N'T, E.\|)ression Gives, 16S8. 
Ciod's Metliod of, ^24;^. 

Idea, the, 1125. 

ill Material Life, 2466. 
Devotion and Tioty, 1464. 
Devhtional Impulses, 1685. 
Differences of Approach to Men, 2321 
Different Kinds of Christians, 2096. 

Roads to the Same End, 2261. 
Differentiation, Perfection in, 2259. 
Differing Beliefs, Necessity of, 1973. 
Difficulty of Cioodness Amid Evil, 814. 
Living, 1689. 
Living Aright, 540. 
Right Living, 839. 

Proportioned to Fineness, 1479. 
Dilutinc: Truth, Necessity of, 1240. 
Dimming of Conscience, 1349. 
Direct and Indirect Influence, 2439. 
Disa(;reement Without Quarrel, 926. 
Disappointments in Wedded Life, 119. 
Disaster, Social Liability to, 919. 
Disbanding of American Armies, 984. 
Disciples of Jesus, the, 1233. 
Discipline of Trouble, 636. 

Unpleasant, 1563. 
Disciplinary Treatment, 649. 
Disclosures of the Future, 335. 
Discomfort Glorified, 666. 
Discouraging Young Christians, 66. 
Discoursing at the Last Supper, 1935. 
Discrimination in Preaching, 2329. 

of Qualities, 940. 

Reading With, 2449. 
Disease, Torpidity Prolific of, 1663. 
Disfellowshiped, Christian Men Cannot 

be, 2159. 
Dishonest Success Transient, 571. 
Dishonesty a Hard Master, 750. 

Atmospheric, 746. 

Burdens Society, 914. 

Folly of, 572. 
Disorder, Order in, 2534. 
Disposition and Volition, 1739. 
Disproportionate Natures, 471. 

Soul-Qualities, 1684. 
Disputation, 745. 
Dissensions of Humanity, 2473. 
Dissipation, 61. 
Distorted Views of God, 11 19, 
Distress, Trust in Time of, 2017. 
Disturbance the Price of Progress, 2371. 
Disturbances of Reform, 2372. 
Diversity, Power in, 2260. 

of Social Life, 923. 
Divine and Human Cooperation, 1305. 
Nature, 1188. 
Sympathy, 1193. 

Benevolence, 1 145. 

Comforter, the, 1194. 



Divine Conceptions from Earthly Experi- 
ences, 1 155. 

Democracy, 11 22. 

Faith in the, 2023. 

Fatherhood, the, 148. 

Guidance, Privilege of Taking, 1324. 

Impulse of Love, 11 7 2. 

Influence on Human Soul, 131 1. 

Ripening Power of, 1320. 
Inspiration not Creation, 1 306. 
Intention, Pain by, 213. 
Intercourse, Tokens of, 1510. 
Judgment, 1634. 
Justice, I182. 
Law and Divine Mercy, 2255. 

of Betterment, 2532. 
Love, Eternity of the, 1183. 

for Man, 2571. 

in the Soul, 1748. 
Measurement, the, 1181. 
Mercy and Divine Law, 2255. 
Parent, the. Sin Against, 1430. 
Paternity, the, 1177. 
Power Through Human Mediums, 

1313- 

Sensibility to the, 1984. 

Slavery, 133. 

Spirit in Every Soul, 1317. 
Utilizing the, 1319. 

Truth : Human Statements, 2184. 

Willingness to Help, 1832. 

Wisdom, Search for, 1 1 10. 
Divinity of Christ, the, 1281. 
Meekness, 1752, 
Do the Near Duty, 17 16. 
Doctrinal Differences, 2214. 

Intolerance, 2189. 

Preaching, 2182. 
Doctrine and Destiny, 1476. 

of Election, 2204. 

Total Depravity, 2249. 
Doctrines and Life, 2 181. 

of Inspiration, 1962. 

Puzzles of, 2183, 

the Proving of, 2221. 
Doing Good, Pleasure of, 2394. 

the Habit of, 1520. 
Double Life, a, 13S8. 
Doubt and Faith, 1985. 

Cheerlessness of, 1971. 

Eras of, 1972. 

the Power of, 1978. 
Downward Way, the, 14 13. 
Drawn of God, 2027. 
Dry Preaching, 2314. 
Dull, the Patience of the, 421. 
Durable Character, the, 469. 
Duty and Destiny, 446. 

Fidelity to, 525. 

of Activity, 536. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



649 



Duty of Church-Mcmbcrship, 2075. 
Health, 182. 
Sweet Influence, 857. 
the Strong, 598. 
Shirking the Call of, 550. 
the Habit of, 1343. 
Prayer of, 1817. 
Dying and Living, 311. 
the Act of, 297. 
Ease of, 299. 
Peace of, 301. 

Ear and Tongue Leagued for Evil, 792. 
Early Christianity, 2192. 

Development Slow, 2471. 

Hardships, Good Fortune in, 655. 

Hindrances in Christian Living, 1627. 

Human Records, 1882. 

Marriages, in. 

Needs Outgrown, 1647. 

Surroundings, 844. 
Earth and Heaven, 351. 
Growth in, 328. 

Body for the, 210. 

Connection with Heaven, 1434. 

Heaven above the, 1754. 

Judgments in Heaven, 317. 

the Meek Possessing the, 1507. 

View of Moral Truth, the, 464. 
Earthly Abundance ; Heavenly Pov- 
erty, 616. 

and Heavenly Power, 1325. 
the Heavenly, the, 339. 

Conditions Forgotten in Heaven, 348. 

Dangers, Heavenly View of, 1996. 

Experiences, Divine Conceptions 
from, 1 155. 

Immortal, an, 983. 

Immortality, 1750. 

Losses Insignificant, 708. 

Loves, Heavenly Associations with, 

175- 
Preparation for Heaven, 323. 

Sadness, Heavenly Joy, 238. 

Work, Eternity to Show, 333. 
Easier Way, the, 2087. 
Easter Sunday, 1252. 
Eating is Engine-Running, 180. 

on Principle, 186. 
Ecclesiasticism, Religion Hindered by 

2154. 
Eden, the Garden of, 2209. 
Edification, 1617. 
Educated Virtues, 797. 
Education and Training, 12. 

Labor Unions and, 928. 

of Jesus, the, 1228. 

Transgression as, 2432. 
Educational Taxation Wise, 2419. 
Educator, Holy Spirit an, 1302. 



Eki'ECT and Cause, 140 1. 

of Lincoln's Death, 982. 
Sorrow, 248. 
Effects of Culture, 1673. 

Life on the Soul, 357, 
Efficiency of Miracles, 1904. 

Sects, 2146. 
Effluence of Goodness, 1072. 
Effort, Power From, 593. 

the Measure of Credit, 1389. 
Elaborate Conversions, 1572. 
Election, Doctrine of, 2204. 
Elevation Means Effort, 2489. 

of Christian Democracy, 2526. 
Elijah's Dramatic Career, 1906. 
Elms of New England, the, 2583. 
Emergency, Prayer in, 1818. 

Religion, 1526. 
Emmaus, Jesus at, 1254. 
Emotion and Intellect, 361. 
Motion, 410. 

in Action, 442. 

not Religion, 1496. 
Emotional Nature of Religion, 1488. 

Natures, Extremes of, 411. 
Empire of Thought, the, 1440. 
Emptiness and Greediness, 575. 

of Money-Getters, 577. 
Pantheism, 1118, 
Unbelief, 1980. 
Empty Meditation, 386. 
End Crowns the Work, the, 1762. 

of Life, Work to the, 278. 
the Year, the, 1664. 
Endeavor, a World of, 1649. 
Endless Talking, 781. 
Endowed Benefactions, Longevity of, 

2402. 
Endurance of a Righteous Republic, 

1015. 
Energizing Power of Excitement, 439. 
Energy of Goodness, 434. 
ENGINE-Running, Eating is, 180. 
Enjoyment, the Power of, 613. 
Enlargement of Christian Life, 1645. 

Recreations, 55. 
Enlarging Ideal of God, 1727. 
Enrichment by Trouble, 229. 
Enthusiasm, Motive Power of, 869. 

of Love, 1789. 
Entreated, God Easy to be, 1203. 
Environment, 837. 

Superior to, 662. 
Epistle to the Romans, 1942. 
Equality and Brotherhood, 2495. 
Equalizing Wages, Folly of, 2498. 
Equanimity, 161 i. 
Equivalent Theory of Heaven, the, 

1467. 
Equivalents in Temperament, 378. 



650 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Eradicating Had Habits, 724. 

Era for Glad Life, an, 2539. 

Eras of Doubt, 1972. 

Erkction of God's Kingdom, 2475. 

Error, Associating with Those in, 1512. 

Escape from Soul-Bondage, 1590. 

Trouble, 684. 
Essence of Sin, the, 1386. 
Essential Criminality, 1392. 

Quality of the Bible, 1836. 
Essentials of Theology and Preaching, 

2351- 
Esthetic Religion, Weakness of, 1449. 

Element, Help of the, 2573. 
Eternal Life, Promise of, 1676. 
Eternity of the Divine Love, 1183. 

to Show Earthly Work, 333. 
Ethics and Sentiment, 1450. 
Europe, Social Unrest in, 998. 
Evanescence of Experiences, 414. 
Evanescent Fancies, 1438. 
Events and Parables, 1927. 
EvER-I'rescnt Christ, the, 1278. 
Everyday Book, the Bible an, 1846. 

Goodness, 1504. 

Gratitude, 1097. 

Life, Reputation from, 904. 

Preaching, 864. 
Every Man, Good in, 447. 

Preacher a Partialist, 2275. 

Soul, Divine Spirit in, 1317. 
Evidence of Things Not Seen, the, 201 1. 
Evil, Active and Passive, 922. 

Always Evil, 1368. 

and Good, Conscience Works, 1335. 

Avoidance of, 1029. 

Bondage, Release From, 1432. 

Courses, Destruction in, 14 16. 
Legibility of, 57. 

Deeds, 1395. 

Difficulty of Goodness amid, 814. 

Disguised, 770, 

Ear and Tongue Leagued for, 792. 

for the Sake of Good, 562. 

Getting Accustomed to, 14 19. 

Insensibility to, 1418. 

Life, the, 83. 

Ministers, and Reform of, 2364. 

Mysterious Powers of, 1 35 1. 

Native Evil Finds, 793. 

of Evil Thought, the, 1387. 

One Man's Power for, 920, 

Origin of, 1127. 

Overcome with Good, 950. 

Problem of, 2199. 

Proneness to, 1394. 

Propagation of, 1424. 

Returning Good for, 1797. 

Speaking, 787. 

Tampering With, 1422, 



Evil Temper, 171. 

the Hearing of, 795. 
Strength of, 1426. 

Thought, the Evil of, 1387. 

Traits, Reclamation of, 723. 

When to Escape from, 1364. 

Wit, 771. 
Evils of Poverty, 701. 
the City, 838. 
Evolution Among Scientists, 2236. 

and Theology, 2242. 

Creative Design by, 2237. 
Evolutionary View of Sin, 1383. 
Example, Force of, 866. 
Excessive Activity, 582. 
Excitement and Incitement, 1487. 

Energizing Power of, 439. 

Universal Desire of, 438. 
Exclusive Preaching, 2324. 

Refinement Not to be, 1081. 
Exercised by Sorrow, 264. 
Exhausted, the Bible Not, 1879. 
Experience and Hope, 2001. 

Fashions Our Ideal of Christ, 1263. 

Learning by, 8. 
Experiences, Evanescence of, 414, 
Expression by Deeds, 1080. 

Increases Emotion, 1577. 

Gives Development, 1688. 

of Pleasure, 802. 

Safety in, 2123, 
External Pulpit Influences: Helpful, 
2338. 

Harmful, 2339. 
Extremes of Emotional Natures, 411. 

Fact and Fame, 893. 

Fiction, 2446. 
Faculties Brighten by Use, 389. 
Obscuration of, 280. 
Sin the Dislocation of, 1390, 
Failure, Courage Under, 679. 

of the Law, 1244. 
Failures in Sermons, 2323, 
Faint Beginnings, Hope in, 1584. 
Faith and Doubt, 1985. 
Reason, 2029. 
Childish Lack of, 2032. 
in Practice, 2025. 
the Church, 68. 
Divine, 2023. 
Womanhood, 88. 
is Trust, 2008. 
Living by, 2036. 
Steadfastness of, 2018. 
Test of, 2020. 
the Man Without, 2007. 

Order of, 2021. 
Universal Application of, 2010. 
Falling by the Way, 2533. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



65. 



Fall of Man, the, 221 1. 
False Ideals, 53S. 

Witness, 788. 
Fame and Fact, 893. 
Family Make the Home, the, 158. 

Prayer, 174. 
Fanatical Patriolism of the Jews, 977. 

Reformers, 2380. 
Fanaticism of the Jews, 2512. 
Fashioned by Christ, 1270. 
Fate, the Religion of, 2206. 
Father and Judge, 141. 

View of God, the, 2254. 
Father's Presence, the, 23. 
FAULT-Finding, 778. 
Faults in Others, 881. 

of Full Natures, 404. 
Faulty Idea of Unity in Worship, 2054. 

Instruments of Providence, 994. 
Fear, 1987. 

a Noxious Element, 1993. 
Pain, 1989. 

and Hope, 1997. 
Love, 2251. 

but a Restraining Agency, 1991. 

Corroding, 1992. 

Foil V of, 1995. 

Value of, 1988. 
Feebleness of Wills, 1458. 
Feeling and Thought, 402. 

before Reason in Higher Trutli, 407. 

Community of, 872. 

in Action, 127. 

Intellection Inimical to, 1090. 

Reaction of, 443. 

Social Effect of, 1459. 

the Growth of, 16 13. 
Law of, 441. 
Power of, 408. 
Fertile Mind, the, 394. 
Fertility in Freedom, 2346. 
Fervent in Spirit, 554. 
Fiber, Toughness of, 476. 
Fiction a Condiment, 2447. 

and Fact, 2446. 

Teaching Truth by, 35. 
Fidelity, 820. 

in Labor, 1737. 

the Radiance of, 2366. 

to Duty, 525. 
Figure of God, Friendship a, 9 1 2. 
Filial Liberties, 22. 

Love, 2565. 
Poinding the Sermon-Subject, 2318. 
Fine Character, Modern Increase of, 

2529. 
Fineness, Difficulty Proportioned to, 1479. 
Finishing of Character, the, 1714. 
Fire of Affliction, 651. 
Firm Hope, a, 688. 



First Soul-Work of Religion, the, I596. 
Fishers of Men, 2312. 
Flatierer, the, 773. 
Flattery, 772. 
Flesh and Spirit, 1065. 

Cannot Discern Spirit, 1062. 
Flimsy Excuses, 1408. 
Flowers, Love of, 2545. 

the Meanings of, 2576. 
F'OLLY of Dishonesty, 572. 

Equalizing Wages, 2498. 

Fear, 1995. 

Fretting, 744. 
Force of Example, 866. 
Foreign Missions, 2093. 

FORELOOKING, 2487. 

Forethinkings About Death, 293. 
Forethought, 2005. 
Forget Your Own Good Deeds, 1785. 
Forgetting, Forgiving Without, 767. 

Sleep a, 204. 
Forgiveness, 815. 

Spirit of, 816. 

of Children, 16. 

the Ground of, 1205. 
Forgiving and Punishing, 1282. 

Without Forgetting, 767. 
Forgotten, Repented Sins to be, 1567. 
Formative Influences, 431. 
Forms of Baptism, 1923. 

Prayer, 181 2. 
Forward ; not Backward, 686. 
Found and Lost, 1490. 
FouNDATioN-Work, 523. 
Fraud in Manufactures, 774. 
Free Communities, Good Customers, 959. 

Government Requires Self- Restraint, 
968. 
Freedom, Fertility in, 2346. 

Germanic Spirit of, 2516. 

of Speech, 2374. 
the Will, 2203. 
French Estheticism, 2514. 
Fretting, Folly of, 744. 

Shows Weakness, 741. 
Friendship, a Figure of God, 912. 

Trouble a Test of, 672. 
Friendships, 909. 

Rarity of, 911. 
Frivolous Zeal, 758. 
Frugality. 828. 

Moral Worth of, 698. 
Fruitful Lives, 1530. 
Fruitfulness, 1534. 
Fruits of the Spirit, 1321. 

Make Christianity, 

1457- 
Full Natures, Faults of, 404. 
Fullness of God, the, 1200. 
F'undamental Elements, three, 2265. 



652 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Furniture, the Bible as, 1859. 
Future, American Confidence in the, 
1014. 

and Present, 1682. 

Disclosure of Character, 349. 

Disclosures of the, 335. 

for Mope, the, 2004. 

Joy a Tresent Help, 334. 

Life, a Prophecy of, 327. 
Thought of, 341. 

of the Wicked, 2219. 

Perils of the, 318. 

Retribution, 2250. 

Splendor of the, 356. 

the Church of the, 2160. 
Past and the, 1568. 

Gamhung, 56. 

Garden of Eden, the, 2209. 

General Aim, Judgment by, 1033. 

Confession, the, 1435. 
Generic Unity; Specific Variation, 2161. 
Generosity and Benevolence, 2386. 

not Benevolence, 2388. 
Generous Dread of Bankruptcy, 560. 
Genesis, 1891. 

Geniality in Christian Life, 1579. 
Gentleness, 812. 
Genuine Religion Enjoyable, 1493. 
Genius Needs Industry, 507. 

not to be suppressed, 372. 

Obligations of, 373. 

the Labors of, 508. 
Gentleman, the, 848. 
Germanic Spirit of Freedom, 2516. 
Getting Accustomed to Evil, 1419. 

and Giving, 2359. 

Knowledge Brings Wisdom, 2431. 

Religion, 1585. 
Gift of Love, the, 21. 
Gifted Natures to Live Superiorly, 15 18. 
Gifts of Love Lasting, 2407 
the Heart, 801. 

to God, 1 217. 
Give God the Best, 1535. 

How to, 2409. 

God's Willingness to, 1 174. 
Giving, 2385. 

and Getting, 2359. 
Receiving, 1463. 
Glad Life, an Era for, 2539. 
Glory of Death, 303. 

God, the, 1 176. 
Love's Servitude, 97. 
the Spirit: Struggles of the 
Flesh, 1943. 

Out of Obscurity, 657. 
God and Man, 2352. 

Prayer, 1802. 

as Disciplinarian, 1192. 



God, Beneficence of, 1131. 
Called, in Trouble, 2019, 
Casting Care on, 1830. 
Central in Human Affairs, 1164. 
Christ's Interpretation of, 1 175. 
Conceived Through Man's Best Qual- 
ities, 1154. 
Conceptions of, 1121. 
Cruel Views of, 2216. 
Distorted Views of, 1 1 19. 
Drawn of, 2027. 
Easy to be Entreated, 1203. 
Enlarging Ideal of, 1727. 
Found Through the Heart, 1477. 
Gifts to, 1 2 17. 

Governmental View of, 1 144. 
Growing Views of, 2014. 
Growth in Knowledge of, 11 37. 
Human Judgments of, 11 20. 
Hunger and Thirst for, 1117. 
Ideals of, 1113. 
in Christ, 1151. 
the Soul, 109 1. 
Nature, 2568. 
Independent Workers for, 2108. 
Interpretation of, 1219. 
in the Image of, 1 1 14. 
is I,ove, 1 107. 
Longing for, 1088. 
Lover, Man-Hater Cannot be, 1796. 
Making Use of, 11 69. 
Man's Access to, 1 142. 

Indifference to, 1087. 
Praises Acceptable to, 2051. 
Serenity in, 1537. 
Strength in, 2028. 
of Law, a, 1 143. 
Partnership with, 557. 
Power of Weakness Allied with, 

2356. 
Realization of, 1138. 
Revelation of, 1707. 
Sin Against, 1429. 
Symbolized in Human Love, I185. 
the Delicacy of, 1202. 

Father, not Avenger, 1178. 
God the Ruler, 2248. 
View of, 2254. 

Glory of, 11 76. 

Grace of, 11 5 2. 

Great Heart of, 1198. 

Historic Christ of, 1257. 

Image of, 362. 

Mover ; Man the Actor, 436. 

Peace of, 1765. 

Rest of, 2038. 

Ruler ; God the Father, 2248. 

Soul's Response to, 1675. 

Sympathy of, 1173. 

Universal Medicament, II80. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



653 



God, the Word of, 2561. 
Thoughts of, 1 147. 
to be Spiritually Apprehended, 1 153. 
Transcends Knowledge, 2012. 
Trust in, 2024. 
Working in Us, 13 16, 

through Men, 1 3 14. 
Yielding to, 1618. 
Godless Love, 106. 
Goo's Abundance, 1191. 
Brooding Love, 1089. 
Care of His Children, 675. 
Children, 1108. 
Dealings, 677. 
Emotion, 121 3. 
Forgiving Love, 1204. 
Forgiveness Absolute, 1207. 
Remedial, 1206. 
Free Grace, 1189. 
Generosity, 12 14. 
Goodness, Constancy of, 12 16. 

Waits for Men, 1184. 
Government, 1133. 
Gracious Bounty, 11 90. 
Heirs not Poor, 709. 
House, the Zeal of, 505. 
Incarnation in Christ not Strange, 

1288. 
Jewel-Case, 1523. 
Kingdom a Long Result of Time, 2509. 

Erection of, 2475. 
Kingship, 1179. 
Love, 1 199. 

and His World, 4. 

Man's Need, 1212. 
for His Children, 1 140. 
Mercies, 1196. 

Method of Development, 2243. 
Mint, 623. 

Modeling of Man's Clay, 1723. 
Mothering of His Children, 1201. 
Nature not Self-Centered, 1139. 
Outflaming Life, 1 149. 
Patience, 1195. 
Promises Earnest, 1211. 

Ignorance as to, 1 854. 
Laws of Nature, 2031. 
Neglect of, 1 209. 
Sincere, 1210. 
Providence : Man's Ignorance, 2033. 
Sculpture, 647. 
Spirit, Power of, iiir. 
Stewards, Unfaithfulness of, 605. 
Tenderness for the Weak, 1186. 
Tlioughts in Nature, 2569. 
Ways of Influence, 1303. 
Willmgness to Give, 1174. 
Words, Permanence of, 1963. 
Work Continuous, 24S2. 
Golden Mean, the, 591. 



Good Deeds, 15 17. 

Forget Your Own, 1785. 

Evil for the Sake of, 562. 
Overcome with, 950. 

Fortune in Early Hardships, 655. 

Growth, Slow Growth, i6i6. 

in Every Man, 447. 

Invisible Growths of, 2479. 

Life, a, 276. 

Men Bettered in the Church, 2077. 

Name, a, 901. 

Value of a, 902. 

Nature, 860. 

Natured People, 809. 

Rudeness, 753. 

Passing Impressions of, 1 105. 

Phrasing, Power of, 2443. 

Recuperative Power of, 2567. 

Report, Things of, 1481. 

Start, Conversion a, 1587. 

that Lives, 2400. 

the Cost of, 658. 

Things, Sharing the, 417. 

Thoughts Not Applied, 2331. 

Time Coming, the, 2468. 

Work in Unseen Places, 524. 

Works, 1626. 
Goodly Parentage, a, 131. 
Goodness a Growth, 1607. 

Effluence of, 1072. 

Energy of, 434. 

Finds Goodness, 2395. 

Multiplies, 167 1. 

Nobility of Wealth with, 597. 

the Measure of Man, 71. 

to be Active, 544. 

Made Apparent, 1521. 
Gospel and Law, 1941. 

Public Affairs, the, 2345. 

Leveling Tendency of the, 970. 

of John, the, 1937. 

Stories, Irregularity of the, 1920. 

the Law and the, 2245. 
Governmental View of God, 1144. 
Governments Fit Peoples, 957. 
Grace of God, the, 1 152. 

Physical Means of, 208. 
Grades of Motive, 458. 

Religious Revivals, 2129. 
Grandeur of Man, 72. 
Grateful Natures, 1094. 
Gratitude, 819. 

as a Motive Power, 1095. 

to Christ, 1269. 
Jesus, 1 29 1. 
Gravitation and Resolutions, 846. 
Great Artist, the, 2575. 

Events, Silent Coming of, 2503. 

Experiences, Minor Events and, 1756. 

Feelings for Great Occasions, 416. 



654 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Great, Heart of CJod, tlie, 1198. 

Lives, Inspiration of, 1098. 

Meaning in Small Texts, 1911. 

Men, Imperfection of, 375. 

Miniledness in Humble Callings, 511, 

Minds, Greatness of, 2438. 

Natures Destroyed, 1417. 

Occasions, Great Feelings for, 416. 

Religious Geniuses, 1939. 

Sermons, 2286. 

Sins, and Little Ones, 1396. 

Thoughts Destroy Small Troubles, 
665. 

Troubles, Cleansing Power of, 267. 
Greater Strength, Lighter Burden, 171 1. 
Greatkst is Love, the, 1766. 
Greatness, Humble Beginnings of, 643. 

of Great Minds, 2438. 
the True Orator, 2290. 

Power of, 2437. 
Greediness and Emptiness, 575. 
Greeks, Moral Inferiority of, 2513. 
Grief, Joy in, 222. 

Revelations of, 235. 
Gross Measurements, 2564. 
Ground of Forgiveness, the, 1205. 
Grounds of Adoption, 157 1. 
Growing Views of God, 2014. 
Growth, Goodness a, 1607. 

Ideal and Real, 134. 

in Earth and Heaven, 328. 
Faith Gradual, 2030. 
Knowledge of God, 1 137. 

of a Lifetime, the, 1694. 
Colonial Liberty, 963. 
Feeling, the, 1613. 
Ideals, 1058. 
Love, 108. 

the Atmosphere of, 1604. 
Grudge, Holding a, 765. 
Grumblers, 756. 
Guide, Trouble as a, 663. 

Habit, Beauty of, 835. 
of Criticism, the, 776. 
Doing Good, the, 1520. 
Duty, the, 1343. 
Sulkiness, the, 742. 
Habits of Hearing, 794. 

Revealed, 710. 
Habitual Generosity, 2410. 
HALF-Hearted Religion, 1492. 

Truths, 719. 
HAND-Book, New Testament, the, 1915. 
Happiness a Means of Grace, 14. 
and Nerves, 444. 
from Health, 493. 
Within, 490. 
in Achievement, 552. 
Made Manifest, 497. 



Happiness, Making, 502. 

Not Having but Being, 496. 

of the Immortal, 329. 
Hard Master, Dishonesty a, 750. 

Natures, Tender Places in, 2320. 
Hardnp:ss in Life, 692. 

to Endure, 656. 
Harm of Profanity, the, 946. 
Harmony and Unity, 2263. 

Essential in Marriage, 104. 
Haste to be Rich, 609. 
Hate Evil Deeds, not Evil-Doers, 942. 
Hatred and Love, 1780. 
" He Knew What Was in Man," 1241. 
Head and Heart, 1743. 

Importance of Stomach to, 187. 

the Heart Uses the, 405. 
Healer of Souls, God the, 1220. 
Health, Degrees of, 183. 

Duty of, 182. 

Giver, Action a, 179. 

Happiness from, 493. 

the Mainspring of Civilization, 178. 
Healthful Living, Social Duty of, 918. 

Man, the, 177. 
Hearers, Truth to be Adapted to, 2344. 
Hearing, Habits of, 794, 

of Evil, the, 795. 
Heart and Head, 1743. 

Associations, 843. 

Belief with the, 403. 

Eloquence, 2270. 

Enthusiasm, 1642. 

Gifts of the, 801. 

God Found Through the, 1477. 

Heaven in the, 332. 

Intents of the, 1076. 

Makes Known the Book, the, 1840. 

the: the Brain : Money, 559. 

Uses the Head, the, 405. 
Hearts, Homes Built by, 126. 
Heaven Above the Earth, 1754. 

Abundant Entrance into, 325. 

and Earth, 351. 

Conceptions of, 324. 

Earth-Connection with, 1434. 
Judgments in, 317. 

Earthly Conditions Forgotten in, 348. 
Preparation for, 323. 

Hymns in, 2070. 

in the Heart, 332. 

Our Father, Which Art in, 1804. 

Quarreling as Preparation for, 170. 

Sickness, 319. 

the Equivalent Theory of, 1467. 
Heavenly and Earthly Power, 1325. 

Associations with Earthly Loves, 175. 

Guidance, 1328. 

Father, the, 1 161. 

Joys, Intimations of, 322. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



(>5S 



Heavenly, the Earthly and the, 339. 

View of Earthly Dangers, 1996. 

Vision, the, 1764. 

Welcome, the, 326. 
Hebraism and Christ, 1243. 
Hebrew Prophets, the, 1907. 
Hebrews, Labor Among the, 514. 
Heedless Judgments, 779. 
Heedlessness, 727. 
Help at the Critical Time, 2086. 

Divine Willingness to, 1832. 

of the Esthetic Element, 2573. 

the Time for, 1559. 

when Needed, 220. 
Helpful Work, Joy in, 340. 
Helplf^sness of the Uneducated, 2426. 
Hereafter, the, 347. 

We Shall Know, 230. 
Heredity, 41. 
Hero Worship, 1047. 
Heroes of Adversity, 640. 
HEROisNf in Sickness, 219. 

Moral Quality of, 462. 

of Silence, 96. 

the Chicago Fire a Lesson in, 2540. 
Hidden Beauty Revealed, 646. 

Life, the, 1069. 

Man, the, 1073. 

Thoughts, 384. 
High Civilization, Liabilities of, 987. 

Destiny of Humble Work, 521. 

Feelings Transitory, 413. 

Spirituality a Late Development, 1706, 
Higher Developments, Slow, 1615. 

Excitements, the, 1553. 

Life in Human Love, the, 103. 
Lower Powers in, 368. 
Obstacles to the, 1692. 

Moods, Power of, 1701. 

Truth, Feeling Before Reason in, 407. 

View of Christ, the, 1223. 
Highest Joys of Life, 1745. 

Liberty, 954. 
Historic and the Personal Christ, the, 
1221. 

Christ of God, the, 1257. 
Historical Need of the Old Testament, 

1877. 
Hoarded Wealth, 594. 
Holding a Grudge, 765. 
Holy Ghost, the Sin Against the, 81. 

Living, Self-Effect of, 1531. 

Spirit an Educator, 1302. 
and Man, the, 1298. 
Need of the, 1297. 
Holiness, Beauty of, 1505. 
Home Blessings Radiated, 163. 

Character Tells, 164. 

Charity Begins at, 2384. 

Influence, 156. 



Home Life the Test of Character, 162. 
Lover, the, 173. 
Selfishness, 167. 
the Family Make the, 158. 
World not Our, 336. 
Homely Toil, Pleasure in, 529. 
Homes Built by Hearts, 126. 
Honesty in Work, 826. 
Honor or Shame in Wealth, 592. 
Hope and Condemnation Reconciled, 1310. 
Experience, 2001. 
Fear, 1997. 
Patience, 1998. 
for Organized Labor, 929, 
Cures Weariness, 1999. 
Cheer of, 2003. 
for Humanity, the, 2458. 

the Death-hour, a, 305. 
in Death, the, 295. 

Faint Beginnings, 1584. 
of Heaven in Old Age, 282. 
Reason for, 2002. 
the Future for, 2004. 
Splendor of, 2544. 
Hopeful View, the, 2000. 
Horizons, Immortality Enlarges, 320. 
Hospital, the Church a, 2078. 
Hours of Vision, 1054. 
Household, the, 155. 
How Conscience Acts, 1340. 
to End Quarrels, 764. 
Find Christ, 1556. 
Give, 2409. 

Look at Scenery, 2551. 
Read the Bible, 1852. 

Life of Christ, 1919. 
Repay Injury, 817. 
Take Trouble, 637. 
Use Illustrations, 2302. 
Human Affairs, God Central in, 1 164. 
Development, 2460. 
and Divine Nature, I188. 

Sympathy, 1193. 
View of Man, 2527. 
Development, 1300. 
Experience Transitory, 380. 
Goodness Needs Nourishment, 1690. 
Imperfection, 1637. 
Judgments of God, 1120. 
Knowledge Fragmentary, 2194. 
Love, God Symbolized in, 1185. 

the Higher Life in, 103. 
Mediums, Divine Power through, 

I3'3- ^ „ 

Nature, Knowledge of, 2282. 

Organized Variety of, 2188. 

Without Religion, 1441. 
Opinion an Uncertain Gauge, 906. 
Side of Atonement, 1290. 
Soul, Divine Influence on, 131 1. 



656 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Human Spirit Unequally Developed, 363. 

Unity and Variety, 2488. 

Variability, 74. 
Humanity and Cultivation, 75. 
the Gospel, 2485. 

Christ's Valuation of, 5. 

Dissensions of, 2473. 

in Trouble, 878. 

Interplay of, 2467. 

March of, 2483. 

Temples of God in, 2490. 

the Hope for, 2458. 
Rise of, 2524. 
Sorrowr of, 269. 

Upward Progress of, 2504. 
HuMANlZATiON of Literature, 2456. 
Humble Beginnings of Greatness, 643. 

Callings, Great-Mindedness in, 511. 

Helpers, 522. 

Work, High Destiny of, 521. 
Humiliation of Christ, the, 1226. 
Humility, Honorable, 2083. 
Humor and Wit, 482. 

the Friend of Conscience, 1336. 
Sense of, 485. 
Hunger and Thirst for God, 1 117. 

for Continuance, 342. 
Hunting Happiness, 489. 
Husbands and Wives, 121. 
Hymnody to be Cultivated, 2066. 
Hymns in Heaven, 2070. 

Inspiration of, 2063. 
Hypocrisy, 769. 

Iconoclasm of the Paris Communists, 

997- 
Ideal and Real Growth, 134. 

Beyond the Real, the, 1043. 

Man, the, 80. 

of Love, the, 1 10. 

Manhood, the, 1042. 

Self-Government the, 2427. 
Ideals, Growth of, 1058. 

Must be High, 1046. 

of God, 1 1 13. 

Under Trial, 120. 
Idealization, 1045. 
Ideas, Wealth in, 2069. 
Idolatry of Money, 608. 
Ignorance as to God's Promises, 1854. 

Invites Tyranny, 958. 

of Science, the, 2255. 

the Cure of, 2429. 

Worthlessness of, 2425. 
ILL-Gotten Gains, 543. 
Illness, 212. 

Illustration, Christ's Methods of, 2300. 
Illustrations from Nature, 2547. 

How to Use, 2302. 
Image of God, the, 362. 



Imaginary' TiouIjIc, 682. 
Imagination, 379. 

and Belief, 1976. 

Stronger than Reason, 2326. 
Imaginative Truth-Seekers, 2325. 
Immanent God, the, 11 29. 
Immature, yet Genuine, 1619. 
Immigration, 995. 

and Freedom of Amusements, 1000. 
Immorality and Irregular Habits, 59. 
Immortal, Happiness of the, 329. 
Immortality and Youth, 69. 

Enlarges Horizons, 320. 

Life without, 343. 

Love Teaches, 315. 

of Spiritual Labor, 535. 

Things Hoped for in, 354. 
Immutability of the Bible, 1913. 
Impatience in Personal Career, 731. 
Imperfect Men, 2413. 

Truths, 2241. 
Imperfection, 457. 

of Great Men, 375. 
Impersonality of Jesus, the, 1237. 
Importance of Basilar Elements, 475. 
Stomach to Head, 187. 
Importunate Prayer, 1S22. 
Improvement Honestly Misjudged, 1494. 
Impulses to be Guarded, 365. 

towards Christian Life, 1548. 
" In Adam's Fall," 2213. 
" In Him W^e Live," 1330. 
" In the Image of God," 11 14. 
Inactive Life, Low Grade of the, 551. 
Incitement and Excitement, 1487. 
Incomplete Character, 1025. 
Incompleteness of Biblical Statements, 
1881. 

Patience with, 1678. 
Inconspicuous Evil Influences, 1371. 
Increased Moral Sensibility, 1652. 
Independent Character, Training to, 154. 

Workers for God, 2108. 
Indian and Negro, 2518. 
Indifference and Unbelief, 1970. 
Indirect Guilt, 730. 

Temptations, 1373. 
Individual Message, the, 2276. 

Preaching, 2335. 
Individuality, 2412. 
Individuals and Communities, 874. 
Indolence, 512. 

a Corrupter, 530. 

Poisonous, 726. 
Indolent, the. Temptation Finds, 1377. 
Indulgence, Shortsightedness of, 1398. 
Industry, 504. 
Ineffective Thinking, 385. 
Inequalities of Condition, 699. 
Infant Humanity in the Bible, 2470. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



^57 



I.NKiUEi-iTY as to Primitive Revelation, 
2229. 

Lack of Sympathy is, 945. 
Iniinity, Incomprehensible, 1 130. 
Infirmity and Sin, 1384. 
Influence, 854. 

God's Ways of, 1303. 

Higher than Authority, 972. 

Independent of Circumstances, 374. 

of Character, 865. 
Christ, 1258. 
Noble Deeds, 1948. 
Self-Consciousness, 859. 
Society, 833. 
Soul on Soul, 437. 
Visible Goodness, 1503. 

the Measure of Value, 858. 
Inharmonious Faculties, 383. 
Iniouity, Rejoicing in, 791. 
Injury, How to Repay, 817. 
Insensibility to Evil, 1418. 
Insidious Sins, 1359. 
Insignificant, Significance of the, 2500. 
Insincerity, 2117. 
Inspiration, 1835. 

Doctrines of, 1962. 

of Great Lives, 1098. 
Hymns, 2063. 
the Bible, 1867. 

Power of, 2016. 

Progressive, 2191. 

Truths of, 1876. 
Inspired Use of Uninspired Material, 1886. 
Instant Action on Noble Impulses, 1554. 
Institutions of Religion, 2166. 
Insubordinate Mind-Servants, 466. 
Intangible Property, 2553. 
Intellect and Emotion, 361. 
Intellection Inimical to Feeling, 1090. 
Intelligence and Knowledge, 2428. 

Liberty and Religion, 962. 
Intelligent Inhumanity, 883. 

Sinning, Meanness of, 1428. 
Intensity, Power of, 435. 
Intents of the Heart, 1076. 
Interchange of Theologies, 2220. 
Interplay of Humanity, 2467. 
Interpretation of God, 1219. 

Prophetic Visions, 1950. 
Interpreting God's Will, 1777. 
Interior not Exterior Quality, 603. 

Obligation Superior to Law, 1686. 
Intimacy, 908. 

Intimations of HeavenVy Joys, 322. 
Intolerant Toleration, 1511. 
Inventors, Benefactions of, 2531. 
Invisible, the, 1697. 

Growths of Good, 2479. 

Ministry of Children, the, 42. 

Visions of the, 321. 



Invitation to the Communion, 2056. 
Inward and Outward Riches, 695. 

Conflicts, 1610. 

Life, the, 1066. 

Light, the, 17 12. 

Ornaments, 1074. 

Quality, Outward Show not, 488. 
Irish, the, 2515. 

Irregular Habits and Immorality, 59. 
Irregularity of the Gospel Stories, 1920. 
Is Religious Excitement Indecorous, 1499. 
Issue of Tribulation, 650. 
It is the Lord, 1643. 

Jacob's Ladder, 1599. 
Jehovah, Christ's Representation of, 11 50. 
Jesus and John the Baptist, 1230. 
Solomon, 1925. 
at Emmaus, 1254. 
Cryptic Parables of, 2448. 
Gratitude to, 1 291. 
in the Tomb, 1250. 
Leaves Galilee, 1106. 
Love of Retirement, 1236. 
Parables, Aptness of, 1926. 
Persons Associated with, 1934. 
Resurrection of, 1251. 
the Childhood of, 1227. 
Education of, 1228. 
Disciples of, 1233. 
Impersonality of, 1237. 
Life of, 1225. 
Look of, 1234. 
Peaceful Presence of, 1274. 
Polar Star, 1267. 
Teaching of, 1239, 
Temptation of, 1924. 
Jewels, Spiritual Emblems, 2566. 
Jewish View of Death, 302, 
Jews, Fanatical Patriotism of the, 977. 
Fanaticism of the, 2512. 
Separateness of the, 976. 
John the Baptist, 1922. 

and Jesus, 1 230, 
Forerunner, 2369. 
Gospel of, 1937. 
Joining the Church, 2074. 
Joy after Sorrow, 232. 
and Sorrow, 1729. 
in Affliction, 224. 
Grief, 222. 
Helpful Work, 340. 
Trouble, 254. 
Mosaic Provision for, 487. 
of Sacrifice, the, 7. 

the New Life, 1600. 
Over the Lost One Found, 1158. 
the Soul's Longing for, 495. 
to the Lord, 499. 
Joyless Religion, 492. 



658 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Joys Awaiting Us, 501. 
JunoE and Father, 141. 
JUDGMENT by General Aim, 1033. 
Judgments of Law and of Love, 24. 
Just Anger, 424. 
Justice, 821. 

and Love, 2252. 

Love in, 1208. 

Kindling of the Spirit-Life, 1598. 
Kindness of Pain, 653. 
Kingdom of the Beautiful, the, 2570. 
Knowledge and Intelligence, 2428. 

of Christ, 1 27 1. 

God Must Grow, 1060. 
Human Nature, 2282. 

Passeth Away, 2258. 

Present and Future, 2179. 

Too Dearly Bought, 1366. 

Trust Without, 2009. 

Labor, among the Hebrews, 514. 
Fidelity in, 1737. 
Organizations, 931. 
Unions and Education, 928. 
Danger of, 930. 
Laborer and the Machine, the, 532. 
Laboring for a Revival, 2127. 
Labors of Genius, the, 508. 
Lack of Christian Sympathy in Churches, 
2098. 

Moral Purpose, 1020, 
Sympathy is Lifidelity, 945. 
for Men, 2095. 
Language, Simplicity of, 2299. 
Large Families, 160. 
Larger Evidence of Design, 11 28. 

View, the, 2491. 
Last Day of the Year, 1757. 

Supper, Discoursing at the, I935. 
Late Maturity in Life, 277. 
Laughter, 483. 
Law, a God of, 1 143. 
and Gospel, 1941. 
Love, 146. 

Judgments of, 24. 
Providence, 2556. 
the Gospel, the, 2245. 
Breakers, Worse than, 573. 
Cumulative Violations of, 1404. 
Failure of the, 1244. 
in the World's Tumult, 2535. 
Interior Obligation Superior to, 1686. 
Liberty the Aim of, 955. 
not Religion, 2256. 
of Feeling, the, 441. 
Success, the, 515. 
Value, the, 542. 
Laws of Life Generally Obeyed, 1037. 
Interpreted, 1862. 
the Two Vital, 1468. 



Learning by Experience, 8. 

God's Nature, 1 790. 

Liberty, 2424. 

to Live, 1623. 

Speak the Truth, 15. 
Legally Debased Currency, a, 1004. 
Legibility of E:vil Courses, 57. 
Legislative Thievery, 1008. 
Lenten Truce with Sin, 14 10. 
Lesson Must Suit the Scholar, 2328. 
Lessons from the Cradle, 3. 

of Virtue, Results of Vice, 1990. 

Taught by Children, 36. 
Leveling Tendency of the Gospel, 

970. 
Liabilities of High Civilization, 987. 
Liberal, Temptation of the, 2226. 
Liberty in Religious Thinking, 2225. 
the Pulpit, 2347. 

Intelligence and Religion, 962. 

is Safe, 960. 

Obedience to Law, 78. 

the Aim of Law, 955. 

Vital Force of, 965. 
Lies to Children, 20. 
Life, a Good, 276. 
March, 549. 

an Expounder of Moral Truth, 

1839. 

and Doctrines, 2181. 

Aroused by Revivals, 155 1. 

Bereavement Expansive of, 270, 

Christianity for All of, 1522. 

Complexity of, 382. 

Hardness in, 692. 

Highest Joys of, 1745. 

Indeed, the, 2327. 

Inspires Life, 891. 

Interpreting God Through Prayer, 
1809. 

Interprets Language, 2441. 

Late Maturity in, 277. 

Misfits in, 579. 

Needs Love, 1769. 

of Jesus, the, 1225. 

Outward and Inward, 1286. 

Partner, Choosing a, 112. 

Remnants of, 678. 

Test the Bible by, 1864. 

the Background of, 314. 
Standard for, 1170. 
Voyage of, 2474. 

Varying Standards in, 937. 

Without Immortality, 343. 
Life's Storms, to Escape, 1755. 
Lifetime, the Growth of a, 1694. 
Life- Work, the Christian Life a, 1484. 
Light, a Soul Open to the, 1301. 

Striving Against the, 2218. 

to be Received, 1315. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



659 



Like Begets Like, 818. 

in Mental Action, 138. 

Priest, Like I'cople, 2285. 
Limitations of Comprehension, 1 109. 
God in Christ, 1255. 
Society, 836. 
Limited Forgiveness in Nature, 189. 

Value of Sorrow, 250. 
Lincoln, Assassination of, 246. 
Lincoln's Death, Effect of, 982. 
Literal Human Equality Impossible, 

2497. 
Literature, Humanization of, 2456. 

of the Old Testament, 1878. 
Little Faults, 714. 

Lies, 717. 

Questioner, a, 11. 

Sins, and Great Ones, 1396. 

Things in Scripture, 1S74. 

Virtues, 79S. 
Live Above Care, 740. 

Learning to, 1623. 
Living and Dying, 311. 

Aright, Difficulty of, 540. 

Beyond Malice, 660. 

by Faith, 2036. 

Difficulty of, 1689. 

Epistles, 1509. 

God, the : Personality, 1141. 

Gospels, 17 15. 

Needs Learning, 927. 

Sacrifice, a — the Body, 192. 
Loftiness : Sermon on the Mount, 1928. 
Look of Jesus, the, 1234. 
Loom of Time, the, 2481. 
Long and Short Prayers, 18 13. 

Suffering, 694. 

Words to Children, 34. 
Longevity of Endowed Benefactions, 

2402. 
Longing for God, 1088. 
Lord, Joy to the, 499. 
Lord's Prayer, the, 1933. 
Loss of Children, 223. 
Losses, no Choosing of, 243. 
Lost and Found, 1490. 

Baby Kept, the, 262. 

Cares Precious, 260. 

One Found, Joy Over the, I158 

Shall be Found, the, 352. 

Souls, 1562. 

Wealth Appreciated, 6x9. 
Lovable God, a, 11 34. 
Love, a Token of, 353. 

above Passion, 105. 

and Conscience, 1799. 
Fear, 2251. 
Hatred, 1780. 
Justice, 2252. 
Law, 146. 



Love as Judge, 2247. 

Beareth All Things, 829. 

Believeth All Things, 177 1. 

Christianity Without, 1776. 

Cushioning Conscience, 882. 

Divine Impulse of, 1172. 

Element in St. Paul, 1774. 

Enthusiasm of, 1789. 

from Within, 1794. 

God is, 1107. 

Growth of, 108. 

in Justice, 1208. 
Service, 128. 

Light in Darkness, 218. 

Lightens Labor, 135. 

Measure of, 1 15. 

Needs Nourishment, 114. 

Not Occasional, 1775. 

Obedience to Law and to, 2253. 

of Flowers, 2545. 

Man for Woman, 102. 
Money, the, 607. 
Praise, 898. 

Persistence of, 1788. 

Pride Softened by, 17 19. 

Seeks the Lowest, 1770. 

Speaking the Truth in, 925, 

Suffering the Test of, 233. 

Supreme, 1800. 

Teaches Immortality, 315. 

the Anger of, 145. 
Gift of, 21. 
Ideal of, 1 10. 
Primal Source of, 136. 
Theology of, 2246. 

to be Manifested, 805. 

God Means Love to Man, 172. 

Tokens to Christ, 1277. 

Transforming Selfishness, 1602. 

Virtues Dependent on, 1767, 
Lovely Old Age, a, 2S7. 
L»3Ve's Beginning, 99. 

Power, 1 146. 

Servitude, Glory of, 97. 
Loving Atmosphere, the, 1485. 

Kindness, 1793. 

Necessity of, 1787. 

Our Enemies, 1772. 
Low Christian Attainment, 1657. 

Grade of the Inactive Life, 551. 

Ideals, 1670. 

Standards in Public Affairs, 993. 
Lower and the Higher Courage, the, 1 249. 
Upper Life, 16S0. 

Law a Step Towards Higher Law, 
2465. 

Life Unsatisfying, the, 1699. 

Planes do not Include Higher, 852. 

Pleasures Destroy Higher, 1393. 

Powers in Higher Life, 368. 



660 



INDEX OF TITLES 



LowKR Oideis, the, 936. 

Lowi.Y Service, 1768. 

Luminous Hours after Darkness, 1763. 

Natures, 1049. 
Lustful Fires, 426. 

Machine, the Laborer and the, 532. 
Madonna a Typical Mother, a, 151. 
MAKE-Shilt, Religion not a, 1445. 
Making Others Happy, 803. 

Use of God, 1 169. 
Malice, Living Beyond, 660. 
Malicious Gossips, 785. 
Malign Feelings, to Cure, 949. 
Man and God, 1969. 

Controlling Nature, 2557. 

Cruelly of, 82. 

Divine Love for, 2571. 

Grandeur of, 72. 

Hater Cannot be God-Lover, 1796. 

Human and Divine View of, 2527. 

in the Making, 2477. 

Making Takes Time, 2478. 

Money not the, 621. 

Needs God, 1017. 

Position Does Not Make the, 49. 

of Few Talents, the, 358. 

the Actor ; God, the Mover, 436. 

Responsible, 13 18. 

the Church and the, 2101. 
Fall of, 221 1. 
Holy Spirit and, 1298. 

Without Faith, the, 2007. 

Work the Measure of, 506. 
Manhood and Religion, 1462. 

Property not, 641. 

the Beauty of Man, 79. 

Ideal of, 1042. 

Mankind, Wealth Used for, 618. 

Manliness in Bankruptcy, 561. 

of Repentance, 1565. 
Man's Access to God, 1142. 

Best Qualities, God Conceived 
Through, 1154. 

Brotherhood, 877. 

Capacity for Growth, 2492. 

Chaotic Incompleteness, 2486. 

Faculties to be Regulated, 430. 

Higher Nature, Poverty of, 1656. 

Ignorance : God's Providence, 2033. 
of Himself, 1059. 

Indifference to God, 1087. 

Ineptness, 541. 

Low Estate, 1700. 

Nature, Complexity of, 381. 

Need and God's Love, 121 2. 
of Adversity, 629. 
Another Life, 350. 
Restraint, 423. 
the Bible Coeval with, 1883. 



Man's Possibilities, 2430. 

Praises Acceptable to God, 2051. 

Regulator, 1868. 

Serenity in (iod, 1537. 

Spirit Needs God's Spirit, 1309. 

Strength in God, 2028. 

Susceptibility, 834. 

Temptableness, 1370. 

Varied Aspects, 77. 

Weakness, 2484. 
Manufactures, Fraud in, 774. 
Many Called: Few Chosen, 1720. 

Sided Temptations, 1691. 

Sidedness of the Bible, 1845. 
Map, the Bible a, 1S60. 
March, Life a, 549. 

of Humanity, 2483. 
Market and the Church, the, 539. 
Marriage, Harmony Essential in, 104. 

Permanency of, 123. 
Married Life, Counterparts in, 116. 
Marvels of the Body, 181. 
Material Life, Development in, 2466. 
Matter and Spirit, 1696. 
Maturing of Character, 1705. 

Under Sorrow, 268. 
Meaning in Petty Mosaic Details, 1894. 

of Sorrow, 259. 

the Sepulcher, 244. 
Meanings of Flowers, the, 2576. 
Meanness of Intelligent Sinning, 1428. 
Means of Grace, Happiness a, 14. 
Measure of Achievements, 455. 
Love, 115. 

Man, Goodness the, 71. 
Morality, 1024. 
Measurements of Things Worldly, 1733. 
Medicinal Power of Christianity, 2381. 
Meek, Blessed are the, 1 100. 

Shall Inherit the Earth, the, 1773. 

the, Possessing the Earth, 1507. 
Meekness, Coming Triumph of, 1779. 

Divinity of, 1752. 

Quiet Power of, 1753. 
Meeting, Men Who Should Speak in, 
21 16. 

Speaking in, 21 15. 
Memory of a Mother, the, 152. 

Benefits, 1093. 
Men, Differences of Approach to, 2321. 

Fishers of, 2312. 

God Working through, 13 14. 

God's Goodness Waits for, 1184. 

Heedless of Moral Danger, 1409. 

Judged by Their Own Standards, 474. 

Must be Born Better, 2464. 

Need Other Men, 876. 

Ready to be Helped, 2480. 

the Study of, 2283. 
Wasting of, 2472. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



661 



Men Who Should Speak in Meeting, 21 16. 

Without Aspiration, 1085. 
Men's Perplexities to be Worked Out, 

1967. 
Mental Action, Like Begets Like in, 138. 

Vigor, Bodily Health for, 194. 

Weather, Clear and Cloudy, 388. 
Merciful, Blessed Are the, iioi. 
Mercy, Christ's Works of, 1232. 

with Cheerfulness, 823. 
Mere Doctrinal Discussion, 2180. 

Feeling to be Avoided, 113. 

Morality, 1030. 
MERRY-Maker and his Soul, 1406. 
Method, Conversion a Change of, 1561. 
Microscopic Conscience, 1337. 
Military Americans in Civil Office, 9S8. 
MiND-Force and Muscle-Force, 370. 

Hunger, 369. 

Ownership, 2552. 

Should Dominate, 364. 

Work at Night, 392. 
Ministerial Instinct, the, 2281. 
Ministers, an Obstacle for, 2309. 

and Reform of Evils, 2364. 

Place Hunting for, 2307. 
Ministry of Books, 2436. 
Minor Events and Great Experiences, 

1756. 
Miracles, Efficiency of, 1904. 

of To-day, 1905. 

Supplemental, 1903. 
Miraculous Elements, 1917. 
Mirth, 481. 

Mirthful Illustrations, 2303. 
Misconception of Repentance, 1566. 
Misfits in Life, 579. 
Misjudgment of the Young, 44. 
Mistakes, 399. 
Misunderstood, 2104. 
Misuse of This World, 546. 
Mixed Elements in Churches, 2100. 
Moderate Morality, 1036. 
Moderation in Work and in Play, 201. 
Modern American Perils, 1002. 

Increase of Fine Character, 2529. 

Miracles, 2142. 

Religious Influence, 2177. 
Modest Merit, 2581. 
MoNEY-Getters, Emptiness of, 577. 

Getting, Damages of, 576. 

Idolatry of, 608. 

Makers, 606. 

Not the Man, 621. 

the Heart : the Brain, 559. 

the Love of, 607. 

to be Used, 595. 
Moads, Sympathy of, 25. 
Moral Character, Beauty of, 1735. 

Courage, Physical and Mental or, 473. 



Moral Danger, Men Heedless of, 1409. 
Depravity and Physical Beauty, 460. 
Deterioration, 722. 
Disability, 1825. 

Element, Superiority of the, 463. 
Inferiority of the Greeks, 2513. 
Intelligence of Commerce, 589. 
Intuition, 454. 
Judgment Important, 1412. 
Judgments, the " Personal Equation " 

i". 453- 

Principle in Affairs, 563. 

Purpose, Lack of, 1020. 

Quality of Heroism, 462. 

Sense, Public Life Dulls tlie, 992. 
Taught, not Intuitive, 459. 

Teaching from Physical Pain, 191. 

Training, 449. 

Truth, Life an ExjMunder of, 1839. 
the Earth-view of, 464. 

Worth of Frugality, 698. 
Morality and Piety, 1474. 

Spirituality, 1021. 

Better than Nothing, 1028. 

but Partial, 1026. 

Human and Divine, 1 1 56. 

Indispensable, 1019. 

Measure of, 1024. 

not Enough, 1022. 

the Root, 1035. 
Moralities, Conceit in, 1543. 
Morals, the Danger-Line in, 1355. 
Morbid Seeking of Trouble, 1994. 
Morning, Conversions Like the Dawn of, 

1539- 
Mortal and Immortal Vision, 344. 
Mortality, Contentment with Unnatural, 

337- 
Mosaic Provision for Joy, 487. 

Training, 1895. 
Mother and Child, 139. 

the New Birth, the, 150. 

Creed, the, 2264. 

Nature, 2548. 

of all Graces, the, 1687. 

the Memory of a, 152. 
Motherhood, 129. 

Ideal, the, 1783. 

Nobility of, 130. 

Transformation by, 1 32. 
Mother's Eye, The, 2. 

Forgiveness, a, 147. 
Motion and Emotion, 410. 
Motive, Grades of, 458. 

Power, Gratitude as a, 1095. 
of Enthusiasm, 869. 
Motives, not Acts, 887. 
Mount of Vision, the, 2013. 
Mourning for Death, 257. 
MoVEMENT.Progress Conditioned on, 2234. 



662 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Mui.Tiii.icn V of Tliouglits, 391. 
Municipal Prosperity, 1013. 
Murk, Thinking in a, 395. 
Musci.K-Force and Mind-Force, 370. 
Mutual Ht.lpfulnebi.s, 884. 

Judgnitnts, 452. 

Recognition of Sects, 2162. 
Mysterious Powers of Evil, 1351. 
Mystery of Life Cleared, 2037. 
Mystic Interpretation Unhelpful, 1842. 
Mystical, the Simple and the, 1238. 

Nagging, 783. 

Name Above Every Name, the, 1260. 

Associations, 1936. 
Narrowness of Conceit, 2267. 
Nation and the States, the, 980. 
National Ailments, 986. 

Excitements, 979. 

Honesty, 1006. 

Importance of Cities, IOI2. 

Life, Wealth in, 599. 
Native Benevolence, 241 1. 

Evil Finds Evil, 793. 

Gifts no Standard for Measure, 1738. 

Ordination, 2277. 
Natural and Spiritual Life, 1672. 

the Religious Life, the, 1442. 

Bent to he Meeded, 50. 

Death, the, 296. 

Development, the Church a, 2134. 

Gifts, Consecration of, 94. 

Law, 2555. 

anil Providence, 1 166. 
in Spiritual Things, 1614. 
Righteousness a, 1473. 

Religion, 1460. 
Naturally Good Children, 2418. 
Naturalness in Prayer, 2119. 

of Religious Revivals, 871. 
Nature, Associations with, 2578. 

Christian Charge of, 1651. 

God in, 2568. 

God's Thoughts in, 2569. 

Illustrations from, 2547. 

Limited F'orgiveness in, 189. 

of Character, 892. 
Christ, the, 1222. 
Prayer, the, 1 801. 
Sin, 1381. 

Overpowering Grace, 15 19. 

Providence in, 1 163. 

the Balm of, 2585. 
Nature's Retribution, 1357. 

Wealth to be Found Out, 2562. 
Near to Death, 291. 

Necessary Labors on the Sabbath, 2047. 
Necessity of Differing Beliefs, 1973. 
Diluting Truth, 1240. 
Loving, 1787. 



Need of the Holy Spirit, 1297. 
Needless Doubt, 1870. 
Talk, 780. 
Worry, 743. 
Ne(;ativk Goodness, 870. 

Morality, 1482. 
Neglect, 729. 

of God's Promises, 1209. 
Negro and Indian, 2518. 
Neither Good nor Bad, 445. 
Nerves and Happiness, 444. 
New Aspects of Truth not to be Hastily 
Preached, 2349. 
Birth, the, 1299. 

Mother and the, 150. 
England, the Elms of, 2583. 
Era, Spiritual Enrichment of the, 

2240. 
Ideals, 1050. 

Given by Christ, 1048. 
Ideas, Caution with, 2343. 
Life, Beginnings of the, 1597. 
foy of the, 1600. 
Postponing the, 1446. 
Light, 2231. 

Spirit, the. Old Letter, 1884. 
Testament Miracles, 1916. 

Silences of the, 1918. 
Supreme Elements of the, 

1914. 
the Hand-Book, 1915. 
the Old and the, 2224. 
Truth from Single Men, 2355. 

to be Separated from Error, 
2350. 
Truths, 2222. 

Antiquity of, 1841. 
View of Sin, the, 2239. 
Newspaper, the, 2454. 
Night, Mind-Work at, 392. 

of Sorrow, the, 272. 
NiMBLENESs of Piovcrbs, 2444. 
No and Yes, 1376. 

Choosing of Losses, 243. 
Conscience, 1331. 
Marriage in the Resurrection, 125. 
Original Righteousness, 2215. 
Safety in Solitude, 840. 
Nobility before Decoration, 477. 
in Adversity, 676. 
of Motherhood, 130. 

Wealth with Goodness, 497. 
Noble Burden-Bearing, 1732. 
Deeds, Influence of, 1948. 
Impulses, Instant Action on, 1554. 
Poesy Immortal, 2451. 
Thought, a, 396. 
Nobleness Compels Admiration, 867. 
Nomadic Americans, 2521. 
NoN-Fulfillinent not Law Breaking, 1636. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



663 



Not Chosen, Because Not Choosing, 1560. 

Joyous, but Grievous, 234. 

Mode, but Fact, of Conversion, 1582. 

the Church, but the Christian, 863. 

Unclothed, but Clothed Upon, 330. 
NoTHiNc for Nothing, 516. 
NovEL-Reading, 2445. 
Noxious Element, Fear a, 1993. 

Obedience, Patience in, 1621. 
Power from, 1444. 
to Law and to Love, 2253. 
Object of Prayer, 1803. 
Objections to the Christian Life, 145 1. 
Obligations of Genius, 373. 
Obscure Work, 527, 
Obscuration of Faculties, 280. 
Obscurity, Glory Out of, 657. 
Obstacle for Ministers, an, 2309. 
Obstacles to the Higher Life, 1692. 
Obstructions to Truth, 1974. 
Of the Earth, Earthy, 1016. 
Offences, the Owning of, 824. 
Old Age, a Lonely, 287. 

Hope of Heaven in, 282. 
Weakness of, 279. 

and Joy of, 274. 
and the New, the, 2224. 
Letter, the; the New Spirit, 1884. 
Testament, Children and the, 27. 

Historical Need of the, 

1877. 
Judged by the New, 1896. 
Laws, 1893. 
Literature of the, 1878. 
Rejection of the, 1890. 
Truthfulness of the, 1880. 
One Man's Power for Evil, 920. 

Thing Needful, the, 1791. 
Oneness of Creed, 21 10. 
One's Self, Taking Account of, 465. 
Opening of Young Manhood, 46. 
Orator's Voice, the, 2294. 
Oratory, 2288. 
Order in Disorder, 2534. 

of Faith, the, 2021. 
Organized Charity, Advantage in, 2403. 
Danger in, 2404. 
Labor, Hope for, 929. 
Variety of Human Nature, 2188. 
Origin of Evil, 1127. 
Original Christianity, 1307. 
Other Denominations, Preachers from, 
2163. 

Men's Consciences, 1344. 
Crookedness, 567. 
Prosperity, 705. 
World, Worth in the, 316. 
Orthodoxy and Christianity, 1725. 
Our Father, Which Art in Heaven, 1804. 



Our Hope, Christ, 121 8. 

Infirmities, 1385. 

Need, Christ's Motive, 1280. 
Outbreaking Corruption a Symptom, 

1009. 
OuT-Door Life, 197. 
Outgrown Sins, Repenting of, 1411. 
Outside Light on the Bible, 1843. 
Outward and Inward Life, 1286. 
Riches, 695. 

Show not Inward Quality, 4S8. 
Owning of Offences, the, 824. 

Pain by Divine Intention, 213. 

Kindness of, 653. 
Pantheism, Emptiness of, 11 18. 
Paper Money, 1005. 
Parable and Fable as Teachers, 28. 
Parables and Events, 1927. 
Parentage, Perplexities of, 143. 

Revelations of, 153. 
Parental Obligation, Sound Bodies a, 

137- 
Parents' Task, the. 142. 
Paris Communists, Iconoclasm of the, 997. 
Partial Christianity, 1472. 

Views, II 32. 
Partisanship in Church Life, 2155. 
Partnership with God, 557. 
Passing Impressions of Good, 1105. 
Passions and Appetites, 193. 

Power of the, 1358. 

Reformation of the, 1564. 

the, 425. 

to Guard Against, 1361. 
Past and Future Church Work, 2109. 
tlie Future, the, 1568. 

not to Rule the Present, the, 2528. 

Still Exists, the, 65. 

Victory Over the, 1605. 
Patience and Hope, 1998. 

in Reform, 2362. 
Obedience, 162 1. 

is Self-Control, 420. 

of the Dull, the, 421. 

the Time for, 558. 

with Incompleteness, 1678. 
Patient Labor, 528. 

Waiting. 1821. 
Patriarchs, Time of the, 1892. 
Patriotism : Concentrated and Diffused, 

978. 
Pattern of Perfection, the, 1782. 
Paul a Darwinian, 2235. 
Paul's " Christ Crucified," 2342. 

Egoism, 1947. 

Last Letter, 1946. 
Peace and Righteousness, 1747. 

Begins in Confusion, 2382. 

Conflict leading to, 2373. 



664 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Peace, Cosmic Center of, 1148. 

of dying, the, 301. 
God, the, 1765. 

the Price of, 159. 

Wailike Energies Used for, 251 1. 
Peacki'UL Presence of Jesus, the, 1274. 

Spirit, the, 813. 
Peacemakers, Blessed Are the, 1 102. 
Penalty Guards Safety, 654. 
Penitent, the Cry of the, 1826. 
People, Rise of the, 2525. 
Perfected, Character to be, 1593. 

Manhood the Idea of Creation, 76. 
Pereectibility, 275. 
Perfection, Conversion not, 1588. 

in Differentiation, 2259. 

tlie Pattern of, 1782. 
Peril, America's Prosperity and, 990. 

in Temptation, 1356. 
Perils of Prosperity, 611. 

Temptation, 1367. 
the Future, 318. 
Permanence of God's Words, 1963. 

Spiritual Gains, 169S. 
Permanency of Marriage, 123. 
Perpetual Spiritual Effort, 1760. 
Perpetuity of the Bible, 19 12. 
Perplexities of Parentage, 143. 
Persecuted for Righteousness' Sake, 659. 
Persecution Should Sweeten Men, 670. 

Truth Spread by, 644. 
Perseverance, 1761. 

in Self-Cleansing, 1541. 
Well-Doing, 1603. 
Persistence in Sorrow, 249. 

of Deeds Done, 1420. 
Love, 1788. 
Persistent Troubles, 683. 
Personal Career, Impatience in, 731. 

Criticism, 775. 

Equation in Moral Judgments, the, 

453- 

Evidences of Sonship, 1709. 

God Fundamental, a, II 16. 

Love, and Benevolence, 2392. 

Power, 862. 

Right to God, a, 1136. 

Rights, 924. 

Saviour, the, 1264. 
Personality, 494. 

in the Preacher, 2272. 

Power of, 868. 
Persons Associated with Jesus, 1934. 
Pertinacity of Bad Habits, 725. 
Petty Cheating, 747. 

Criticisms, 1965. 

Mosaic Details, Meaning in, 1894. 

Sins, 715. 
Pew and Pulpit, 2280. 
Phases of Christian Love, 1683. 



PiiII.OSoPHEk'S God not Adorable, the, 

1115. 
Physical and Mental or Moral Courage, 

473- 

Beauty and Moral Depravity, 460. 

Means of Grace, 208. 

Pain, Moral Teaching from, 191. 
Teaching of, 215. 

Retribution, 188. 
Piety and Devotion, 1464. 
Morality, 1475. 

from Unlikely Conditions, 2143. 
Pl.ACE-Hunting, for Ministers, 2307. 
Place, Worth of Each in His, 2499. 
Platform and Pulpit, 2296. 

Not Pulpit, 2297. 
Please, Preaching to, 2291. 
Pleasure, 498. 

Expression of, 802. 

in Homely Toil, 529. 

of Doing Good, 2394. 

Wrong Use of, 200. 
Poet and Prophet, 1053. 
Poet's Inspiration, the, 2546. 
Polar Star, Jesus the, 1267. 
Politics, Corporate Wealth in, loio. 
Poor Church Members no Excuse for 
Other Men, 1452. 

Contentment, 419. 

God's Heirs not, 709. 

Relief to Stimulate, not Enervate, 

2399- 
Remedy for Scepticism, 1975. 
the Sabbath for the, 2042. 
Popular Intelligence, 2502. 
Refinement, 2494. 
Unrest, Regulation of, 2536. 
Position Does not Make the Man, 49. 
Positiveness of Religion, 1483. 
PossiiiiLiTiES in Culture, 32. 

of Wickedness, 1399. 
Postponing the New Life, 1446. 
Potency of a Christian Household, l6l. 
Potter, the Clay and the, 11 26. 
Poverty, a Primary Cause of, 704. 
Evils of, 701. 
of Man's Higher Nature, 1656. 

Spiritual Qualities, 1674. 
Sainthood in, 693. 
Wealth in, 642. 

Without Love is, 124, 
Power from Eftbrt, 593. 

Obedience, 1444. 
in Diversity, 2260. 
of Association, 842. 
Calvinism, 2200. 
Cheerfulness, 486. 
Christ, 1265. 
Doubt, tlie, 1978. 
Enjoyment, the, 613. 



INDEX OF TITLP:S 



665 



Power of Feelinjj, the, 40S. 
God's Spirit, 1 11 1. 
Good Phrasiiif^, 2443. 
Greatness, 2437. 
Higher Moods, 1701. 
Inspiration, 2016. 
Intensity, 435. 
Personality, 868. 
Repeated Acts, 1405. 
the Passions, 1358. 
Tongue, 943. 
True Preacher, 2287. 
Weak, 520. 
Weakness Allied with God, 2356. 
Practical Sympathy, 888. 

Use of Christ, 1262. 
Practice and Preaching, 3308. 
Theory, 1536. 
Faith in, 2025. 

Must Supplement Study, 1865. 
Praise Lightens Trouble, 242. 
Love of, 898. 
Songs, 2058. 

to God, a Human, not a Divine, 
Need, 2059. 
Pray and Watch, 1829. 
Prayer a Relief, 1808. 

Universal Recourse, 1823. 
and Self-help, 1S27. 
Aspiration of, 1805. 
Continuing Instant in, 1814. 
Delayed Answer to, 1820. 
for an Uplifting, 2006. 

Others, 1831. 
Forms of, 181 2. 
in Emergency, 18 18. 
Life Interpreting God Through, 1809. 
Naturalness in, 21 19. 
Object of, 1803. 
of Duty, the, 1817. 

the Wicked, the, 1824. 
Spiritual, not Material, 1810. 
the Nature of, 1801. 
to be Spontaneous, 18 16. 
Under Pressure, 1819. 
Varied Elements of, 1806. 
PKAYER-Meeting, the, 181 1. 

Woman in the, 2122. 
Prayers, Resisting Answers to, 1828. 
Praying and Thinking, 393. 
Preacher a Man-Builder, the, 2336. 
All Things to All Men, the, 2284. 
Personality in the, 2272. 
the Range of the, 2310. 
Preachers and Teachers, 2414. 
Born, Not Made, 2274. 
from Other Denominations, 2163. 
Preacher's Opportunities, the, 2332. 
Preaching and Practice, 2308. 

Public Spirit, 569. 



Preaching and Theologizing, 2313. 
Theology, 2354. 

Christ Imperfectly, 1283. 

Discrimination in, 2329. 

Dullness and Levity, 2304. 

God's Desire to Save All, 2322. 

Individual Conceptions of, 1292. 

Must Suit Its Era, 2268. 

on Secular Affairs, 1003. 

Politics and Commerce in, 2348. 

Subjects for, 2317. 

Substantial Thought in, 2330. 

the Test of, 15 13. 

to Please, 2291. 

Varied Material in, 2337. 

Variety in, 2316. 
Prejudices, Respect for, 2376. 
Preparation for Crime, 1400. 
Death, 307. 

This World a, 1677. 
Present and Future, 1682. 

Knowledge, 2179. 

Day Scepticism, 564. 

Duties for Children, 31. 

Grief, Future Glory, 225. 

Help, Future Joy a, 334. 

the Past not to Rule the, 2528. 
Pressure, Prayer under, 1819. 
Price of Peace, the, 159. 
Pride, 759. 

Softened by Love, 17 19. 
Priesthood, Value and Peril of, 217 1. 
Primal Source of Love, the, 136. 
Primary Cause of Poverty, a, 704. 

Civic Virtue, Wealth-Making, a, 600. 
Primitive Church, the, 2133. 

Revelation, Infidelity as to, 2229. 
Principle, Eating on, 1S6. 
Principles Follow Rules, 1630. 

of Protestantism, the, 2156. 
Private Interj^rctation, 1S50. 
Privilege of Taking Divine Guidance, 

1324- 
Problem of Evil, 2199. 
Problems of Providence, 1160. 
Process and Product, 1641. 

of Spiritual Betterment, 1625. 
Prodigal's Return, the, 149. 
Profanity, the Harm of, 946. 
Professional Piety, 1527. 
Professors, Christianity Judged by Its, 

1502. 
Profitable I>osses, 707. 
Profitless Explanations, 894. 
Progress, 2462. 

Conditioned on Movement, 2234. 
Disturbance the Price of, 2371. 
Promise of Eternal Life, 1676. 
Prompt Escape from Temptation, 1365. 
Proneness to Evil, 1394. 



666 



INDEX OF TITLES 



pROrAOATION of F^vil, I424. 

Proi'ERTY not Manhood, 641. 
Prophecy of Future Life, a, 327. 
Prophet and Poet, 1053. 
Prophetic Love, 6. 

Visions, Interpretation of, 1950. 
Priiphets, the, 1901. 
Propriety, Corruption with, 1034. 
Proselytini;, 2173. 
Prosperity and Adversity, 627. 

Perils of, 61 1. 

to Circulate, 596. 
Protestantism, the Principles of, 

2156. 
Proverbs, Nimbleness of, 2444. 
Providence and Law, 2556. 

Natural Law, 1166. 

Faulty Instruments of, 994. 

in Nature, 1163. 

Natural and Supernatural, 1 167. 

of Work, the, 517, 51S. 

Problems of, 1 160. 

Rough Handling by, 645. 
Proving of Doctrines, the, 2221. 
Public Affairs and the Gospel, 2345. 
Corruption in, 1007. 
Low Standards in, 993. 

Amusements, 999. 

Conscience, Deterioration in, loii. 

Education and Sabbath-Keeping, 
2048. 

Life Dulls the Moral Sense, 992. 
Young Men in, 991. 

Opinion, 873. 

School, Democracy of the, 2422. 

Spirit and Preaching, 969. 
Pulpit and Pew, 2280. 

Platform, 2296. 
Reforms, the, 2357. 

Liberty in the, 2347. 
Punishing an Forgiving, 1282. 
Punitive Love, 140. 
Puritanism, 2227. 

the Sabbath of, 2043. 
Purpose, Sin Lies in, 1391. 
Puzzles of Doctrines, 2183. 

Qualities, Discrimination of, 940. 
Quality in Activity, 548. 

Virtues, 830. 
Quarrel, Disagreement Without, 926. 
Quarreling as Preparation for Fleaven, 

170. 
Quarrels, How to End, 764. 
Quick Learning, 2434. 

Maturity, Quick Decay, 1639. 
Quid Pro Quo, 513. 
Quiet Conversions, 1581. 

Power of Meekness, 1753. 
" Quit Ye Like Men ! " 1528. 



Race, Salvation of the, 2543. 

Radiance of Fidelity, the, 2366. 

Radicalism of Christ, 1242. 

Raillery, 948. 

Range of the Preacher, the, 2310. 

Rare Virtues Remembered, 2126. 

Rarity of Friendships, 911. 

Rationalism, 1741. 

Reaction of Feeling, 443. 

Reactions and Revivals, 2130. '' 

Reading Nature Aright, 2550. 

Sympathetic Moods for, 2450. 

with Discrimination, 2449. 
Real Man, the, 696. 

Meeting, the, 2114. 

Penitence a Sure Possession, 1640. 

the Ideal Beyond the, 1043. 
Realization of Change, 1576. 

God, II 38. 
Reaping and Sowing, 1609. 
Reason and Conscience, 1342. 
Faith, 2029. 

for Hope, 2002. 

Imagination stronger than, 2326. 
Recalling Griefs, 251. 
Receiving and Giving, 2389. 

One Another, 2073. 
Reclamation of Evil Traits, 723. 
Recreation and Work, 199. 

Necessary, 207. 

Neglected, 585. 
Recreations, Enlargement of, 55. 
Recuperation Under Adversity, 669. 
Recuperative Power of Good, 2567. 
Refinement, Dangers of, 377. 

not to be Exclusive, 1081. 

Uses of, 849. 
Reform Arouses Complaint, 2367. 

Disturbances of, 2372. 

Patience in, 2362. 
Reformation and Repentance, 1421. 

Condemnation not, 2375. 

Critical Moments for, 1414. 

Manifests Evil, 1427. 

of the Passions, 1564. 
Reformers and Reforms, 2379. 
Reformer's Truth, the, 2368. 
Reforms and Reformers, 2379. 

the Pulpit and, 2357. 
Refreshment in Thought of Eternity, 

294. 
Regeneration, 1540. 
Regenerated Man, the, 1661. 
Regulated, Religious Fervor to be, 1501. 
Regulation, not Destruction, 450. 

of Popular Unrest, 2536. 
Rejection of the Old Testament, 1890. 
Rejoicing Amid Sorrow, 266. 

in Iniquity, 791. 
Release From Evil Bondage, 1432. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



667 



Relief, Prayer a, 1808. 

of Tears in Sorrow, 228. 
Religion Acceptable to All Men, the, 

'455- 
and Creeds, 1508. 

Manhood, 1462. 

the Church, 1489. 

the Church, and, 2167. 

Caution in, 1470. 

Cheerfulness in, 500. 

Conservativeness in, 1500. 

Emotion not, 1496. 

Emotional Nature of, 1488. 

Ever-Living, 1453. 

Harmony of Soul, 1525. 

Hindered by Ecclesiasticism, 2154. 

Human Nature without, 1441. 

in Time of Trouble, 1447. 

Institutions of, 2166. 

is Right Life, 1433. 

Liberty and Intelligence, 962. 

Misunderstood, 1466. 

not a Make-Shift, 1445. 
Mysterious, 1456. 

of Fate, the, 2206. 

Positiveness of, 1483. 

Seclusion not, 547. 

the First Soul-Work of, 1596. 
Soul's Health, 1465. 

Theology not, 1461. 

Two Theories of, 1443. 
Religious Depth, 1529. 

Despair, 149 1. 

Emotion Pernicious if not Practical, 
1497. 

Excitement, 2128. 

Feeling and Business, 584. 

Fervor to be Regulated, 1501. 

Helpfulness of Science, 1312. 

Inquirers Need Sympathy, 1558. 

Inspiration and Singing, 2062. 

Inspirations Evanescent, 1104. 

Intolerance, 214S. 

Life, the Natural and the, 1442. 

Masks, 2103. 

Pride, 762. 

Revivals, Grades of, 2129. 

Naturalness of, 871. 

Rites, 2139. 

Symbolism, 2052. 

Thinking, Liberty in, 2225. 
Remembrance, Wealth no Title to, 617. 
Remnants of Life, 678. 
Repeated Acts, Power of, 1405. 

Faults Dim Moral Sight, 713. 
Repentance and Reformation, 1421. 

Manliness of, 1565. 

Misconception of, 1566. 
Repented Sins to be Forgotten, 1567. 
Repenting of Outgrown Sins, 141 1. 



Repose of Death, 300. 
Reprobation, 1423. 
Republic demands Virtue, the, 973. 
Reputation, 896. 

and Character, 897. 

from Everyday Life, 904. 
Resignation, Time for, 221. 
Resist Beginnings, 58. 
Resistance to Temptation, 1372. 
Resisting Answers to Prayers, 1828. 
Resolutions and Gravitation, 846. 
Respect for Prejudices, 2376. 
Responsibility for Adam, 2212. 
Rest for Body and Brain, 2040. 
the Workingmen, 2041. 

of God, the, 2038. 

Sabbath Worship, the, 2044. 
Restraining Agency, Fear but a, 1991. 
Restraint, Man's Need of, 423. 
Result, Credit for Effort Rather than, 456. 
Results of Vice, Lessons of Virtue, 1990. 
Resurrection, Commercial Death and, 
680. 

of Jesus, 1 25 1, 
a Soul, the, 1542. 

Type, a, 331. 
Retirement, Jesus' Love of, 1236. 
Retiring from Business, 586. 
Retrospection, 1758. 
Returning Good for Evil, 1797. 
Revealer, Sorrow a, 247. 
Revelation an Unveiling, 1887. 

of God, 1707. 

the Rocks, the, 2230. 
Revelations Cannot be Hidden, 2244. 

of Grief, 235. 
Parentage, 153. 

the Book of, 195 1. 
Reverence for Women, 89. 
Revenge, the Torment of, 427. 
Revival, Laboring for a, 2127. 
Revivals, 2132. 

and Reactions, 2130. 

Life Aroused by, 155 1. 
Rhetorical Illustrations, 2301. 
Rich, Haste to be, 609. 
Rise of Humanity, 2524. 
the People, 2525. 
Ritual, Dangers of, 2053, 

Variation of, 2138. 
River of Death, the, 306. 
Right and Wrong, 10^9. 

EflFect of Trouble, 628. 

Life, Religion is, 1433. 

Living, DifiFiculty of, 839. 

the Science of, 1869. 

Standards, 281. 

l^nconscious Rebuke of Wrong, 825. 

Use of Appetites and Passions, 47. 
the Bible, 1834. 



668 



INDEX OF TITLES 



I<i(;iiri.'>us Man, the, 1514. 

Republic, Endurance of a, 1015. 
Rkuitkousnkss a Natural Law, 1473. 

and Peace, 1747- 

Blessed Are They Who Hunger and 
Thirst after, 1 103. 

Sake, Persecuted for, 659. 

Superstition Dispelled by, 2559. 

Training in, 1624. 
RlPENER, Suffering a, 261. 
Rii'KNiNO Power of Divine Inllucnce, 

1320. 
Rocks, the Revelation of the, 2230. 
Romans, Epistle to the, 1942. 

Seventh and Eighth of, 1940. 
Rough Handling by Providence, 645. 

Outside, Sweet Inside, 448. 
Rubhish, the Bible Buried under, 1953. 
Ruined Man, a, 702. 
Rule, the Use of a, 952. 
Rules Teach Principles, 953. 
Russia, Despotism in, 2517. 
Ruth, the Book of, 1900. 
Story of, 1899. 

Sabkath and the Saloons, 2046. 

for the Poor, the, 2042. 

Keeping and Public Education, 2048. 

Means Rest, 2039. 

Necessary Labors on the, 2047. 

of Puritanism, the, 2043. 

Vitality of the, 2049. 

Worship, the Rest of, 2044. 
Sacrifice of the Wicked, the, 2055. 

the Joy of, 7. 
Safeguard, Confessed Christianity a, 

2089. 
Safety in Expression, 2123. 
Sainth(jod in Poverty, 693. 
Saloon, the, 2365. 
Saloons, Sabbaths and the, 2046. 
Sanctification and Conversion, 1594. 
Salvableness and Salvation, 1454. 
Salvation, Conditions of, 2257. 

of the Race, 2543. 

Simplicity of, 1549. 

the Captain of Our, 1276. 

through Christ, 1275. 

to be Wrought Out, 1589. 
Saving Spiritual Elements, the, 2459. 
Scandal, 796. 

Scenery, How to Look at, 2551. 
Sceptic, the, 1983. 
Scepticism, Minus and Plus, 1982. 

Poor Remedy for, 1975. 
Scholar, the Lesson Must Suit the, 2328. 
Scholastic Prejudice, 2433. 
School of Christ, the, 1722. 
Science, Advance of Truth by, 2538. 

of Right- Living, the, 1869. 



Science, Religious Helpfulness of, 1312. 

the Ignorance of, 2455. 
Scientists, Evolution Among, 2236. 
Scope of Christianity, 1480. 
Scriptural Treatment of Adam, 2210. 
Scripture, Little Things in, 1874. 

Uses of, 1 87 1. 
Scriptures, Searching the, 1855. 
Search for Divine Wisdom, mo. 
Seclusion not Religion, 547. 
Second Incarnation, the, 1293. 
Secret Sins, 1397. 
Sectarian Misjudgment, 2149. 
Sects, Efficiency of, 2146. 

Mutual Recognition of, 2162. 

Variety of, 2152. 
Secular Affairs, Preaching on, 1003. 
Secularities, Spiritual Value of, 545. 
Seeing God, 11 24. 

as He is, 1 159. 
Seek Higher Things, 685. 
Seeking Good, not Evil, 941. 
Seemingly Unfruitful Work, 526. 
SELF-Absorption, 398. 

Building of the Soul, 1635. 

Centered, God's Nature not, 1139. 

Cleansing, Perseverance in, 1541. 

Consciousness, 763. 

Influence of, 859. 

Control, Patience is, 420. 

Deception in Christian Hope, 1601. 
Crooked Business, 568. 

Description, 789. 

Education, 2423. 

Effect of Holy Living, 1531. 

Examination, 400. 

Advisable, 147 1. 

Government the Ideal, 2427. 

Help and Prayer, 1827. 

in Church-Making, 2113. 

Immured, 615. 

Judgment, 359. 

through Others, 905. 

Knowledge, 1436. 

as to Conduct, 800. 
Speech, 804. 
Tendency, 1666. 

Measurement Upwards, 2440. 

Portraiture, 432. 

Recognition, 433. 

Revelation, 401. 

Righteousness, 1628. 

Seeking Friendship, 768. 
Selfish Aspiration, 851. 

Churches, 2360. 

Men, Solitary, 2383. 

Morality, 1032. 

Service, 574. 
Selfishness and Love in Conflict, 1786. 

of Culture, 376. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



669 



Selling One's Self, 614. 

Seminal Character of the Bible, 1966. 

Senses, Spiritual Life not Gauged by, 

1064. 
Sensibility to the Divine, 1984. 
Sensitive Conscience, a, 1333. 

Consider the, 827. 
Sensitiveness, 777. 

of Children, 33. 
Sentiment and Ethics, 1450. 

Sordid Sense, Judging, 406. 

the value of, 1068. 
Separateness of the Jews, 976. 
Sepulcher, Meaning of the, 244. 

the Women at the, 91. 
Sermon on the Mount: Loftiness, 1928. 
not Original, 1929. 
Opening, 1930. 
Past and Future, 
2228. 

Subject, Finding the, 2318. 
Sermons, Failures in, 2323. 

Transientness of, 2333. 
Service, Love in, ia8. 
Seventh and Eighth of Romans, 1940. 
Shallow Discipleship, 1654. 

Natures, 415. 
Sharing Home-Happiness Outside, 176. 

the Good Things, 417. 
Shining Days, 1759. 
Shirking the Call of Duty, 550. 
Short and Long Prayers, 181 3. 
Shortsightedness of Indulgence, 1398. 
Sickness, Heroism in, 219. 

Remorse of Body, 216. 

Teaching of, 214. 
Significance of the Insignificant, 2500. 
Silence, Heroism of, 96. 
Silences of the New Testament, 1918. 
Silent Coming of Great Events, 2503. 

Corrupting Forces, 1369. 

Prayer, 1&57. 
Simple and the Mystical, the, 1238. 

Laws for Simple Lives, 850. 

Truths, 2269. 
Simplicity of Language, 2299. 
Salvation, 1549. 

the Truth in, 2417. 
SlN Against the Divine Parent, 1430. 
Holy Ghost, the, 81. 
God, 1429. 

and Infirmity, 1384. 

Conviction of, 1570. 

Evolutionary View of, 1383. 

Fundamental in Theology, 1382, 

Lies in Purpose, 1391. 

Mental Truce with, 14 10. 

Nature of, 1381. 

of Bad Temper, 169. 

Revived, and I Died, 1632. 



SiN-sick Soul, the, 1083. 

the Dislocation of Faculties, 1390. 
Essence of, 1386. 
New View of, 2239. 
Sincerity, 822. 

and Correctness of Belief, 1977. 
Sinfulness, a Test of, 1569. 
Singing a Defence Against Temptation, 
2065. 

and Religious Inspiration, 2062. 

Church, a, 2061. 

Uplifting Power of, 2064. 
Single Men, New Truth from, 2355. 

Responsibility, 1425. 

Traits no Test of Character, 470. 

Virtues, and Virtuous Character, 1655. 
Sinner Needs God, the, 1431. 
Sinners, the Church for, 2090. 
Sins Under Conscience, 1346. 
Skimming the Bible, 1856. 
Slander, 944. 
Slang, 790. 
Sleep, a Forgetting, 204. 

the Death of, 202. 
Sleeping, 205. 
Slow Growth of Character, 1638. 

Christ's Peace, 2463. 
Virtue of, 48. 
Small Beginnings, 711. 

Encouraging, 1023. 

Excellences, 799. 

Faults Baits to Larger Ones, 712. 

Meannesses, 716. 

Texts, Great Meaning in, 191 1. 

Transgressions, 735. 

Vexations, 737. 
Smartness, Dangers of, 570. 
Smooth Natures Admirable but not At- 
tractive, 84. 
Social and Spiritual Life, 1027, 

Averages, 2493. 

Connections, 903. 

Contagion of Spirituality, 890, 

Duty of Healthful Living, 918. 

Effect of Feeling, 1459. 

Gain Through Suffering, 917. 

Interdependence, 832. 

Judgments, 939. 

Liability to Disaster, 919. 

Life, Diversity of, 923. 
Value of, 1077. 

Polish, 831, 

Proprieties Disregarded, 2370, 

Relationships, Change of, 853. 

Solidarity, 875. 

Suffering, 913. 

Unrest in Europe, 998. 
Society, Influence of, 833. 

Limitations of, 836. 

the Top and the Bottom of, 934. 



670 



INDEX OF TITLES 



SOCIKTV, tllC Wastes of, 916. 

Truth the Hond of, 811. 
Society's Ri^lit to Control Conduct, 921. 
SoFTKNiNC. the heart by Trouble, 245. 
Soiled by Worklliness, 1070. 
Soi.lDiKViNG One's Growth, 1702. 
Solitariness of Death, 304. 
Solitude, No Safety in, 840. 

Uses in, 841. 
Solomon and Jesus, 1925. 
Some Discouragement Wholesome, 1730. 
SoNSHiP, Personal Evidences of, 1709. 
Sordid Sense, Judging Sentiment, 406. 
Sorrow a Revealer, 247. 

and Joy, 1729. 

Effect of, 248. 

Exercised by, 264. 

Joy after, 232. 

Limited Value of, 250. 

Maturing under, 268. 

Meaning of, 259. 

not Typical of Christianity, 253. 

of Humanity, the, 269. 

Persistence in, 249. 

Rejoicing Amid, 266. 

the Night of, 272. 
Sorrows Intermittent, 240. 
Soul and Body, 652. 

Bankruptcy, 703. 

Bondage, Escape from, 1590. 

Building of the, 1659. 

Creation, 106 1. 

Destroying Greed, 581. 

Divine Love in the, 1748. 

Effects of Life on the, 357. 

Exhaustion, 1407. 

Health, 17 18. 

in Danger, the, 2125. 

Made Manifest, the, 1079. 

on Soul, Influence of, 437. 

Open to the Light, a, 1301. 

Purity, 1075. 

Regimen, 17 17. 

Religion, Harmony of, 1525. 

Self-Building of the, 1635. 

Sickness, 1439. 

Summer in the, 1524. 

Sympathy Unappreciated, 886. 

that Finds God, the, 1533. 

the Body and the, 1018. 
Resurrection of a, 1542. 

to be Protected, the, 387. 

Treasures, 107 1, 

Unknown Powers of the, 1086. 
Soul's Anchor, the, 346. 

Evil Engines, the, 734. 

Health, Religion the, 1465. 

Image of Christ, the, 1266. 

longing for Joy, the, 495. 

Response to God, the, 1675. 



Soul's Riches, the, 1078. 
Sound Bodies a Parental Obligation, 137. 
Sowing and Reaping, 1609. 
Speakinc, and Thinking, 2442, 

Artificial Style in, 2298. 

in Meeting, 2115. 

the Truth in Love, 925. 
Speech, Freedom of, 2374. 

Self-Knovvledge as to, 804. 
Spirit and Flesh, 1065. 
Matter, 1696. 

Fervent in, 554. 

Fruits of tlie, 132 1. 

Life, Kindling of the, 1598. 

of Beneficence, 1171, 
Forgiveness, 816. 
Freedom Irresistible, 966. 

Races, beyond Man, 86. 
Spiritism and Spiritual I/^nging, 1084. 
Spiritual Ancestry, 1099. 

and Natural Life, 1672. 

Betterment, Process of, 1625. 

Culture, 1667. 

Death, 1326. 

Development Takes Time, 1708. 

Discernment, 1063. 

Enrichment of the New Era, 2240. 

Expert, The, 1857. 

Gains, Permanence of, 1698. 

Grace to be Cultivated, 1695. 

Guidance, 1323. 

Hindrances, 1693. 

Indolence, 587. 

Kindred, 1731. 

Labor, Immortality of, 535. 

Life, Beginning of, 1573. 

not Gauged by Senses, 1064. 
Social and, 1027. 

Longing and Spiritism, 1084. 

Moods, 1056. 

Oppression, 1052. 

Poverty, 211. 

Prescription, 2319. 

Qualities, Poverty of, 1674. 

Refreshment, 1679. 

Things, Natural Law in, 1614. 

Truth the Pulpit Theme, 2340. 

Union, 1082. 

Unity of, 166. 

Value of Secularities, 545. 
Spirituality and Morality, 102 1. 

Misunderstood, 1067. 

Morality and, 1041. 

Social Contagion of, 890. 
Spiritually Apprehended, God to be, 

"53- 

Splendor of Hope, the, 2544. 
the Future, 356. 
Spontaneity in Conscience, 1339. 
of Christian Kindness, 1781. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



671 



Spontaneous Virtue, 14S6. 

St. Paul, Love-Element in, 1774. 

Standard, Christ the Only, 1261. 

for Life, the, 1 170. 
Standards, Men Judged by Their Own, 

474. 
Stars and Stripes, the, 985. 
Starting Right, 1591. 
States, the Nation and the, 980. 
Steadfast Ideals, 1668. 

Purpose and Variations, 45 1. 
Steadfastness, 468. 

of Faith, 2018. 
Steadiness Under Temptation, 1354. 
Steering Godward, 1704. 
Stimulants, 195. 
Stoicism not Christianity, 236. 
Story of Ruth, the, 1899. 
Strength, Conceit of, 664. 

of Evil, the, 1426. 

Men and Women, 92. 
Strenuous Life, Trials of the, 845. 
Striving against the Light, 2218. 
Strong, Duty of the, 598. 

Phrases for Strong Feelings, 1498. 
Struggles of the Flesh : Glory of the 

Spirit, 1943. 
Study, Christian Life a, 1578. 

of Men, the, 2283. 
Subjects for Preaching, 2317. 
Substance in Character, 1644. 
Substantial Thought in Christ's Preach- 
ing. 2330. 
Success, Character the Test of, 622. 

Exacts Effort, 510. 

the Law of, 515. 
Sudden Death, 313. 
Suffering, a Ripener, 261. 

Benumbing Effect of, 253. 

the Baptism of, 271. 
Test of Love, 233. 
Suffrage, 975. 
Sulkiness, the Habit of, 742. 
Sullying of Conscience, 1348. 
Summer in the Soul. 1524. 
Sun as a Symbol of Deity, the, 2560. 
Sunday and the Children, 26. 

Christians, 1740. 
Sunny Dispositions, 807. 
Superficial Betterment, 1038. 

Judgments, 1 162. 
Superior to Environment, 662. 
Superiority of the Moral Element, 463. 

the Use of, 1736. 
Superstition Dispelled by Righteous- 
ness, 2550. 
Supreme Elements of the New Testament, 

1914. 
Sureness of Causality, 190. 
Surly Forgiveness, 766. 



Sweet Influence, Duty of, 857. 

Inside, Rough Outside, 448. 
Sweetness After Adversity, 635. 

in Adversity, 691. 
Symbolism of the Bible, 1902. 
Sympathetic Moods for Reading, 2450. 

Witnesses, the Cloud of, 1092. 
Sympathy, Comfort of Mere, 885. 

for Men, Lack of, 2095. 

of God, the, 1 173. 
Moods, 25. 

Religious Inquirers Need, 1558. 

the Balm of, 880. 

Variations in, 2396. 
Systematic Theology, 2196. 

Taking Account of One's Self, 465. 
Talents, the Man of Few, 358. 
Talker, the, 2289. 
Tampering With Evil, 1422. 
Tasks and Time, 537. 
Teacher's Noble Work, the, 2415. 
Teachers and Preachers, 2414. 

Parable and Fable as, 28. 
Teaching of Jesus, the, 1239. 

Physical Pain, 215. 
Sickness, 214. 

Truth by Fiction, 35. 
Tears, 226. 

in Sorrow, Relief of, 228. 
Teasing, 784. 
Temper, 752. 

Provoking Temper, 2377. 
Temperament, Equivalents in, 378. 
Tempered Affliction, 667. 
Temple of God, the, 217. 
Temples of God in Humanity, 2490. 
Temptation, Confession Lessens, 1378. 

Deceitfulness of, 1375. 

Finds the Indolent, 1377. 

of Jesus, the, 1924. 
the Liberal, 2226. 

Peril in, 1356. 

Perils of, 1367. 

Prompt Escape from, 1 365. 

Resistance to, 1372. 

Singing a Defence Against, 2065. 

Steadiness Under, 1354. 

Suggestive, not Compulsory, 1353. 
Temptations and the Lower Life, 1380. 
Temptation's Power, 1350. 
Tempter and Tempted, 1352. 

the, 1 23 1. 
Tender Places in Hard Natures, 2320. 
Tentative Religion, 1550. 
Test of Character, Home-Life the, 162. 
Faith, 2020. 

Instrumentalities, the, 2153. 
Preaching, the, 1513. 
Sinfulness, a, 1569. 



672 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Test the Bible by Life, 1864. 
Tksts of Character, three, 479. 
The Lord Be with Thee, 808. 
Theological Transformation of the 
Bible, 1956. 

Transitions, 2233. 
Theologies, Interchange of, 2220. 
Theologizing, 2195. 

and Preaching, 2313. 
Theology and Evolution, 2242. 
Preaching, 2354. 

Essentials of, 

235'- 

not Religion, 1461. 

of Love, the, 2246. 

Sin Fundamental in, 1382. 
Theory and Practice, 1536. 

not Practice, 2178. 
Things and Thoughts, 519. 

Hoped for in Immortality, 354. 

not Seen, the Evidence of, 201 1. 

of Good Report, 1481. 

Which God Hath Prepared, 355. 

Worldly, Measurements of, 1733. 
Thinking and Praying, 393. 

Speaking, 2442. 

Authority in, 2107. 

in a Murk, 395. 
Thou Shalt not Covet, 748. 

Go Over, 534. 
Thought and Feeling, 402. 

of Eternity, Refreshment in, 294. 
Future Life, a, 341. 

the Empire of, 1440. 
Thoughts and Feelings are Prayers, 1833. 
Things, 519. 

Multiplicity of, 391. 

of God, 1 147. 
Through Jesus Christ, Our Lord, 1273. 
Thy Will be Done, 1187. 
Time and Tasks, 537. 

for Changes, 2232. 
Help, the, 1559. 
Patience, the, 558. 
Resignation, 221. 

God's Kingdom a Long Result of, 
2509. 

of the Patriarchs, 1892. 

the Loom of, 2481. 
Times, Adaptation to the, 2279. 

of Vision, 1986. 
To-day, Miracles of, 1905. 

Needs To-day's Thought, 2223. 
Token of Love, a, 353. 
Tokens of Divine Intercourse, 1510. 
Tomb, Jesus in the, 1250. 
Top and the Bottom of Society, the, 934. 
Tongue, at Home, the, 168. 

Power of the, 943. 
Torment of Revenge, the, 427. 



Torpidity Prolific of Disease, 1663. 
Total Depravity, Doctrine of, 2249. 
Toughness of Fiber, 476. 
Trained Calmness, 367. 

Church Members to be, 2105. 

Perceptions, 366. 
Training and Education, 12. 

by Trouble, 668. 

in Righteousness, 1624. 

of Character, 428. 

the Value of, 509. 

to Independent Character, 154, 

Untractable Natures, 429. 
Transfiguration, the, 1246. 
Transformation by Motherhood, 132. 
Transgression as Education, 2432. 
Transient Aspirations, 1437. 

Knowledge, 1631. 

Troubles, 689. 
Transientness of Sermons, 2333. 
Transition Periods, 2461. 
Transparent Character, the, 590. 
Transplanting of Death, 312. 
Trees, 2584. 
Trial Tests Men, 671. 
Trials of the Strenuous Life, 845. 

Test Strength, 624. 
Tribulation, Issue of, 650. 
Trouble a Test of Friendship, 672. 

as a Guide, 663. 

Bearing of, 258. 

Blessing in, 634. 

Brave Bearing of, 674. 

Certainty of, 630. 

Comfort in, 256. 

Discipline of, 636. 

Enrichment by, 229. 

Escape from, 684. 

God Called in, 2019. 

How to Take, 637. 

Humanity in, 878. 

is Discord, 632. 

Joy in, 254. 

Morbid Seeking of, 1994. 

Religion in Time of, 1447. 

Right Effect of, 628. 

Shows Character, 697. 

Softening the Heart by, 245. 

to Surmount, 484. 

Training by, 668. 
Trust and Anxiety, 2022. 

Faith is, 2008. 

in God, 2024. 

Time of Distress, 2017. 

Without Knowledge, 2009. 
True Art, 2574. 

Christianity, 1448. 

Church, the, 2091. 

Welcomes All, the, 2080. 

Conversion, 1592. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



673 



True Democracy, 971. 

Lovers, 10 1. 

Manhood, 87. 

Meekness, 1751. 

Orator, Greatness of the, 2290. 

Preacher, Power of tlie, 2287. 

Riches, 604. 

Signiticance of the Bible, 1847. 

Worship, 2050. 
Trusting God, 2035. 
Truth, Attractive Presentation of, 231 1. 

Broad Views of, 105 1. 

Immortal, 1322. 

in Anger, 951. 

Simplicity, the, 2417. 

Learning to Speak the, 15. 

Obstructions to, 1974. 

Spread by Persecution, 644. 

Telling, 720. 

the Bond of Society, 811. 

to be Adapted to Hearers, 2344. 

Variableness of, 810. 

Varying V^iews of, 2187. 

Vitality of, 661. 
Truthfulness, 467. 

of the Old Testament, 1880. 
Truths of Inspiration, 1876. 

Varied Ripening-time of, 2208. 
Twenty-Third Psalm, the, 1908, 1909. 
Type, a Resurrection, 331. 

Adam as a, 70. 
Typical Mother, the Madonna a, 151. 
Tyranny, Ignorance Invites, 958. 

Ugly Words, 786. 
Unanchored Soul, an, 1981. 
Unattainable, Value of the, 1044. 
Unbelief and Indifference, 1970. 

Emptiness of, 1980. 
Uncertain Gauge, Human Opinion an, 
906. 

Guides, 2015. 
Uncertaintif^ in Wedlock, Il8. 
Uncertainty and Certainty of Death, 289, 
Uncharitable Verdicts, 938. 
Unchristian Fellowship, 21 12. 

Givers, 2390. 

Orthodoxy, 2147. 
Uncommon Sense, Common Sense Better 

than, 360. 
Uncompleted Providences, 1165. 
Unconscious Beauty of the Christ-Spirit, 
1792. 

Goodness, 1744. 

Influences, 856. 

Preparation for Christianity, 1575. 
Undesired Gems, 1931. 
Undisclosed Histories, 21 18. 
Undue Anxiety for Children, 39. 
Uneducated, Helplessness of the, 2426. 



Unkaithkulness of God's Stewards, 605. 

Unforeseen Effects, 1327. 

Unfound Treasures in the Bible, 1861. 

Unheeded Warnings, 53. 

Unheroic Heroes, 85. 

Uninspired Material, Inspired Use of, 

1886. 
United States, Constitution of, 964. 
Unity and Harmony, 2263. 

in Worship, Faulty Idea of, 2054. 

of Spirit, 166. 

Rather than of Thought, 2140. 
Universal Application of Faith, 2010. 

Desire of Excitement, 438. 
Unjust, the Wealth of the, 610. 
Unknown Beauties in the Bible, 1866. 

Powers of the Soul, 1086. 
Unloving Conscience, the, 1334. 
Unmanliness of Complaint, 5&3. 
Unnoted Tragedies, 706. 
Unnoticed Influence, 855. 
Unpopular Laws, 967. 
Unprofitable Energy, 733, 
Unseen Faults, 721. 

Places, Good Work in, 524. 
Unselfish Heroism, 1778. 
Unsocial Temper, 755. 
Unsuccessful Success, 612. 
Unthinking Ministers, 2293. 
Unused Parts of the Bible, 1875. 
Unveiling, Revelation an, 1887. 
Unwise Character Building, 631. 

Charity, 2398. 

Reformers, 2378. 
Unwritten Realities, 412. 
Uplifting Power of Singing, 2064. 

Prayer for an, 2006. 
Upper and Lower Life, 1680. 
Upward Movement of the Ages, 2542. 

Progress of Humanity, 2504. 
Use, Faculties Brighten by, 389. 

of a Rule, the, 952. 

Superiority, the, 1736. 

Through Waste, 203. 
Useless Religion, 1532, 
Uses of Refinement, 849. 
Scripture, 1871. 
Solitude, 841. 
Utilizing the Divine Spirit, 1319. 

Vacations of the Workers, 583. 
Value and Peril of Priesthood, 217 1. 
Influence the Measure of, 859. 
Measured by Brain-Power, 2496. 
of a Good Name, 902. 

Churchly Forms, the, 2169. 

Fear, 1988. 

Sentiment, the, 1068. 

Social Life, 1077. 

the Unattainable, 1044. 



674 



INDEX OF TITLES 



Value of Training, the, 509. 

the Law of, 542. 
Vanity, 760. 
Variable Moods, 2131. 
Variableness of Truth, 810. 
Variation of Ritual, 2138. 
Variations, and Steadfast Purpose, 451. 

in Sympathy, 2396. 
Varied Elements of Prayer, 1806. 

Material in Preaching, 2337. 

Ripeninor-time of Truths, 2208, 
Varieties of Daring, 472. 
Variety and Human Unity, 2488. 

in Church-Membership, 2079. 
Preaching, 2316. 
Varying Conceptions of Deity, 1123. 

Standards in Life, 937. 

Views of Truth, 2187. 
Ventilation, 198. 
Vicarious Penalty, 915. 
Vice, Youthful Exposure to, 52. 
Victorious Goodness to be Strong, 1749- 
Victory Over the Past, 1605. 
Violent Conversions, 1580. 
Virtue not Negative, 1031. 

of Slow Growth, 48. 
Virtues Dependent on Love, 1767. 

of Business Men, 588. 

Quality in, 830. 
Virtuous Character and Single Virtues, 

1655- 

Visible Goodness, Influence of, 1503 

Vision, Mortal and Immortal, 344. 

Hours of, 1054. 

the Mount of, 2013, 

Times of, 1986. 
Visions of Christ, 1296. 

the Invisible, 321. 
Vital Elements, Agreement as to, 1889. 

Force of Liberty, 965. 

Functions Agreeable, 185. 
Vitality, Activity the Condition of, 1606. 

of the Sabbath, 2049. 
Truth, 661, 
Vocal Power to be Trained for, 2295. 
Volition and Disposition, 1739. 
Voyage of Life, the, 2674. 

Wages, Folly of Equalizing, 2498. 
Want of Strength not Wickedness, 17. 
War, Delight of Peace after, 2520. 

the Bible not a Book of, 1955. 
Warlike Energies Used for Peace, 251 1. 
Warnings Unheeded, 53. 
Warrior, David, the, 1910. 
Waste, in the Creative Process, 2558. 

Use Through, 203. 
Wastes of Society, the, 916. 
Wasting of Men, the, 2472. 
Watch and Pray, 1S29. 



Watch, When to, 1362. 
Way, Falling by the, 2533. 
We Find What We Bring, 861. 

Know in Part, 371. 

Shall Know Hereafter, 230. 
Weak, God's Tenderness for the, 1186. 

Morality Worthless, 1040. 

Power of the, 520. 

Units Mighty in Combination, 2501. 
Weakness and Joy of Old Age, 274. 

of Esthetic Religion, I449. 
Old Age, 279. 
the Church, 2097. 
Wealth, Beneficence of, 601. 

Honor or Shame in, 592. 

in Ideas, 2069. 

National Life, 599. 
Poverty, 642. 

Making, a Primary Civic Virtue, 
600. 

no Title to Remembrance, 617. 

of the Unjust, the, 610. 

to be Diffused, 602. 

Used for Mankind, 618. 

without Love is Poverty, 124. 
Wedded Infidelity, 122. 

Life, Disappointments in, 119. 

Love, 109. 
Wedlock, Uncertainties in, 118. 
Welcome, the Heavenly, 326. 
WELL-Wishers, 2072. 
What a Creed is — and is Not, 2185. 

is Christianity, 1308. 
Preaching, 2266. 

Readers Find in the Bible, 1849. 

Sorrow Does for Us, 237. 

This World is For, 626. 

Was in Man he Knew, 1 241. 

We Shall be, 345. 
Whatsoever Things Are Pure, 2452. 
When God is Near, 1552. 

to Escape from Evil, 1364. 
Watch, 1362. 
Wholesome Thinking About Death, 290. 
Why God Loves Men, 1215. 

Promises Fail, 1703. 
Wicked, Future of the, 2219. 

the Prayer of the, 1824. 
Sacrifice of the, 2055. 
Wickedness of Selfish Culture, 2457. 

Possibilities of, 1399. 
Widening Horizons, 1669. 
Widow's Mite, the, 2406. 
Wife's Influence, the, 117. 
Will, Freedom of the, 2203. 
Willing and Wishing, 1653. 
Willingness to Begin Humbly, 157. 
Wills, Feebleness of, 1458. 
Wise Giving, 2401. 

in His (3wn Conceit, 397. 



INDEX OF TITLES 



675 



Wishing and Willing, 1653. 
Wit and Humor, 482. 
Without Ceasing, 18 15. 

Me, Nothing, I168. 

Love, 1795. 
Witnesses, the Cloud of, 533. 

Sympathetic, 1092. 
Wives and Husbands, 121. 
Woman in the Prayer-Meeting, 2122. 

Love of Man for, 102. 

the Beauty of, 95. 
Womanhood, Faith in, 88. 
Womanly Strength, 98. 
Woman's Influence, 90. 
Women at the Sepulcher, the, 91. 

Reverence for, 89. 
Word of God, the, 2561. 
Work and Play, Moderation in, 201. 
Recreation, 199. 

Blessedness of, 553. 

Honesty in, 826. 

Makes Possible Better Work, 531. 

the Measure of Man, 506. 
Providence of, 517, 518. 

to the End of Life, 278. 
Workers, Vacations of the, 583. 
Working Piety, 1506. 

with Christ, 1294. 
God, 1304. 
WoRKlNGMEN, Rest for the, 2041. 
WoRLD-Growth, Three Stages of, 2541. 

a Preparation, 1677. 

Interprets the Bible, the, 1838. 

Life Helps Soul-Life, 1658. 

Misuse of This, 546. 

Neighborhood, 2510. 

not Our Home, the, 336. 

of Endeavor, a, 1649. 

Restlessness, 2537. 

the Christian in the, 1516. 
Church and the, 2358. 
Place for Christianity, the, 1721. 



WoRLO-Growth.This and the Other, 1555. 
WoRLDLlNESS, Soiled by, 1070. 
Worldly and Christian Joy, 503. 

Living, 1713. 
World's Bulletin, the, 2453. 

Growth, the, 2469. 

Long Growth, the, 2508. 

Tumult, Law in the, 2535. 

Work, This, 2476. 
WoRN-out Creed, a, 2207. 
Worry, 625. 

Worse than Law-Breakers, 573. 
Worst Heresy, the, 2106. 
Worth in the Other World, 316. 

of Each in His Place, 2499. 
the Church, the, 2175. 
Worthlessness of Ignorance, 2425. 
Wrecked Health, 196. 
Wrong and Right, 1039. 

Earthly Training, 578. 

Right Unconscious Rebuke of, 825. 

Use of Conscience, 1332. 
Pleasure, 200. 

Year, Last Day of the, 1757. 

the End of the, 1664. 
Yes, and No, 1376. 
Yielding to God, i6i8. 
Young Christians to be Joyful, 67. 

Corruptors of the, 1402. 

Love, 100. 

Manhood, Opening of, 46. 

Men in Public Life, 991. 

Misjudgment of the, 44. 

Souls, 30. 
Youth and Immorality, 69. 
Youthful Eclipse of Christ, 1229. 

Excesses, 60. 

Exposure to Vice, 52. 
Youth's Voyage Beginning, 45. 

Zeal of God's House, the, 505. 



y.vii'i 



